
Qass t- 

Book 



LIFE AND GENIUS 



OF 



SHAKESPEARE. 



i 



MEMOIRS 

OF THE LIFE OF 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 

WITH 

AN ESSAY TOWARD THE EXPRESSION OF 

HIS GENIUS, 

AND 

AN ACCOUNT OF THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

By RICHARD GRANT WHITE. 







' ^ ) ' . i 



BOSTON: 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. 
1865. 






'Ol 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by 

RICHARD GRANT WHITE, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. 



c « c ' t «■ c «- 



University Press : Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 
Cambridge. 



TO THE HONORABLE 
WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD, LL. D., 

SECRETARY OF STATE. 

CIR,- 

I venture, without your knowledge, to inscribe this 
volume to you as an individual recognition of your long- 
continued and signal services to the Republic. Through 
all your public life the unrelenting foe of wrong and of 
oppression, one of the earliest and most earnest advocates 
of the cause of freedom, a statesman who recognized 
his responsibility to a higher law than that of state ne- 
cessity, yon have yet endeavored to secure the blessings 
of liberty to all by peaceful methods, and to obtain for all 
the protection of the law without the violation of the law. 
Called to the Department of State at a period when our 
foreign relations were fraught with peril and environed with 
difficulty, you have so administered them, that, while you 
calmly maintained the internal sovereignty and the ex- 
ternal rights of the government you represented, the 
jealous ministers of rival nations publicly acknowledged 
your fairness and your candor, and were able only to 
cavil at those assertions of the unabated power and dig- 
nity of the Republic, which, made with unflinching con- 
fidence in an hour of unprecedented trial, touched the 
hearts of your countrymen as the expression of a faith 



yi DEDICATION. 

which was then in very deed the substance of things 
hoped for and the evidence of things not seen, but which 
events have shown to be well founded. Just men may 
have misunderstood you, but your only enemies have 
been the enemies of right and of your country. At the 
hands of some of these, you have lately suffered in com- 
mon with the good President whom we yet mourn. That 
your life was sought with his was an additional testimony 
to your faithfulness and your ability. Men seek to kill 
only whom they fear and hate. That you escaped this 
murderous attempt made by assassins who struck at your 
country through you, was an occasion of rejoicing to true 
men throughout the land. This book, although purely 
literary in its character, may be fitly dedicated to a states- 
man in whom the cause of education has ever found an 
advocate equally zealous and discreet, and whose pen 
has gained him an enviable place in the world of letters. 
That you may live long in the service of your country, 
and that, while the undying interest of the subject of this 
volume wins it readers, this page may do a little toward 
preserving in the minds of your countrymen a memory 
of how much they and freedom owe you, are the hearty 
wishes of 

Your grateful fellow-citizen, 

R. G. W. 



PREFACE. 



npHIS volume is the result of an endeavor 
-^ to present in a narrative form what is 
known and may be reasonably inferred concern- 
ing Shakespeare's life, with an appreciation of 
his genius, and such a history of our early drama 
as would conduce to that appreciation and be 
suited to the perusal of the generality of his in- 
telligent readers. During the last hundred and 
fifty years much has been written upon these 
subjects by men of various fitness for the task, 
and of widely differing degrees of abihty. But 
unless my knowledge of this literature is imper- 
fect, the present book, in its scope, its purpose, 
and its method, is without a rival among its pre- 
decessors. It is not intended for lovers of desul- 
tory gossip on the one hand, or for antiquaries 
and Shakespearian scholars on the other. I 
have undertaken to examine and to estimate the 



^jj^ PREFACE. 



mass of material which has been accumulated 
by the painstaking researches of previous inves- 
tigators of the facts connected with Shake- 
speare's life and of the earlier records of the 
English drama, — much of it having the slight- 
est possible connection, and more no connection 
at all, with the subject, — to arrange with com- 
pactness and coherence that which seemed to me 
to be distinguished from the remainder by truth 
and significance, and so to tell the story that it 
might have a continuous interest for readers not 
especially devoted to dramatic studies. 

Having given my authority in most cases for 
statement or hypothesis, it is not necessary that 
I should here repeat my acknowledgment of ob- 
ligations in this regard. Little has been added, 
and nothing of moment, to the results either of 
the searches made in the last two centuries by 
Betterton, Malone, and Chalmers for tradition and 
record concerning Shakespeare, or of their inves- 
tigations of the social and professional conditions 
under which his life must have been passed. The 
last two writers seemed also to have exhausted the 
field of research in regard to the history of the 
English drama and the Enoflish sta2:e. But Mr. 



PREFACE. ix 

Collier's later work upon those subjects, by its ful- 
ness and its systematic arrangement, supersedes 
all others, either for the use of the dramatic stu- 
dent, or as a book of reference for the occasional 
inquirer. Yet the account of the English drama 
given in the following pages will be found to be 
something more, as well as something less, than 
an abridgment of Mr. Collier's three octavo vol- 
umes. 

These remarks apply only to the first and last 
divisions of this volume. The second, the Essay 
toward an Expression of Shakespeare's Genius, 
is the endeavor of one who, having read the poet 
much and his critics little, has thought his own 
thoughts and trusted his own judgment upon this 
subject, until, with a mingling of confidence and 
diffidence which it would be difficult to explain, 
he now ventures to offer his conclusions as hints 
and aids to others ; conscious the while that 
those who can judge them best are those who 
need them least. 

Thus the purpose of this book is to enable its 
reader to form as nearly as possible a full and 
just appreciation of Shakespeare as a man, a 
poet, and a dramatist. No other thought entered 



^ PREFACE. 

my mind when I laid out my work. But I will 
own that, as I wrote the following pages, I con- 
ceived the hope that those who read them might 
be led to remember, and not only to remember 
but to take to heart, the pregnant and all-impor- 
tant truth, that with the intellectual wealth and 
glory of Shakespeare and Milton and their con- 
temporaries and antecessors, we have inherited, 
not in any indirect and collateral way, but as 
coheirs and equals with our blood brethren in 
Great Britain, however sharp our political sever- 
ance from them, those principles of liberty, that 
intelligent respect for law, and that capacity of 
self-government, which belong to and distinguish 
the English race, which some call Anglo-Saxon ; 
— that if we have attained a national prosperity 
and power, a diffusion of mental culture and moral 
sensibility, and a union of stability and progres- 
sive force hitherto unheard of among any people, 
it is only because we have transplanted here, and 
developed by a normal and unconstrained growth, 
the same political principles and the same laws 
of social development from which spring the real 
power and the true glory of the British nation ; — 
that we in our Englishhood, as they in theirs, are 



PREFACE. xi 

SO subject to the same laws of moral and intellect- 
ual development that, however that development 
may be modified by circumstances, and though 
we are politically two nations with sometimes 
clashing interests, we are not, and indeed cannot 
be, other than one people ; — and that, with all 
our mutual emulation, inevitable as it is from the 
community of our origin, our mental constitution, 
and the similarity of our pursuits, we owe each 
other, if not mutual regard, at least a mutual 
consideration, respect, and confidence heartier 
than that which befits the merely formal inter- 
course of two nations which are called friendly 
because they are not at open enmity. Our com- 
mon inheritance is one which each of us may 
enjoy to the full without diminishing the other's 
share, or impugning the other's title, and which 
we should share without envy, certainly without 
malice or uncharitableness. These truths are 
trite ; but the day will be a sad one, should it 
ever come, when they finally lose their vital bind- 
ing force for those who read in a common mother 
tongue the words of William Shakespeare. 

R. G. W. 

New York, May 23d, 1865. 



MEMOIRS OF 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 



THE name and the works of William Shake- 
speare were widely known and highly 
thought of by his contemporaries. UnHke Ho- 
mer's, his figure does not loom vaguely from the 
obscurity of a pre-historic period ; unlike Dante's, 
it is not revealed by fitful and lurid light amid the 
convulsions of society upon the verge of the dark 
ages. From early manhood to maturity he lived, 
and labored, and throve, in the chief city of a 
prosperous and peaceful country, at a period of 
high intellectual and moral development. His 
life was passed before the public in days when the 
pen recorded scandal in the diary, and when the 
press, though the daily newspaper did not yet 
exist, teemed with personality. Yet of Dante, 
driven in haughty wretchedness from city to city, 
and singing his immortal hate of his pursuers as 
he fled, we know more than we do of Shakespeare ; 
the paucity of whose personal memorials is so ex- 
treme, that he has shared with the almost mythi- 



2 MEMOIRS OF 

cal Homer the fortune of having the works which 
make his fame immortal pronounced medleys, in 
the composition of which he was but indirectly 
and partially concerned ; and two enthusiasts, one 
in the Old England and the other in the New, 
have even maintained that they were written by 
the great philosophers and statesmen of his day, 
who used his name as a stalking horse with which 
to conceal themselves and mislead the public* 

Two generations had not followed that which 
gave to the world the great poet of our race and 
of mankind, when Thomas Betterton, the most 
celebrated London actor of his day, journeyed 
from the scene of Shakespeare's metropolitan dis- 
tinction to that of his rustic youth and his rural 
retirement, in the hope of finding in the latter 
those traces of his private life which had been so 
entirely obliterated in the former. The grateful 
and reverential player, who had gained compe- 
tence and reputation chiefly by performing Shake- 
speare's characters, gathered and preserved a few 
fading but important traditions ; to these the as- 
siduous investigation of more than a century and 
a half has added the records of a few other facts 

* The accomplished and gifted lady who broached this theory 
on this side of the ocean in Putnam'' s Magazine for January, 1856, 
was then, doubtless, suffering from that mental aberration which 
soon after consigned her to the asylum in which she died. The 
Transatlantic critics are, I believe, without a similar excuse for 
the strange fancy of her British rival, which they were so quick 
to condemn in her as a trait of " American " extravagance. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 3 

of hardly more significance, and confirmation of 
some of those traditions ; and this is all the faint 
and uncertain light which falls from the past upon 
the man whose works cast such a blaze of ever- 
brightening glory upon our literature. There have 
been issued, indeed, to us of the present genera- 
tion, pamphlets professing to give new particulars 
of the life of Shakespeare, and tomes with even 
more pretentious titles. But from all these there 
has been but small satisfaction, save to those who 
can persuade themselves that, by knowing what 
Shakespeare might have done, they know what he 
did, or that a reflex of his daily life can be seen in 
parchments beginning, " This indenture made," or 
" Noverint tmiversi per prcese7ttes!' It is with no 
disrespect, nay, it is rather with thankfulness and 
sorrowing sympathy, that the devotee of Shake- 
speare, after examining the fruit of the laborious 
researches of men who have wasted sunlight and 
candles, and worn good eyes, in poring over sen- 
tences as musty as the parchments on which they 
are written, and as dry as the dust which covered 
them, will reluctantly decide that all this mousing 
has been almost in vain. It has incidentally re- 
sulted in the diffusion of a knowledge of the times 
and circumstances in which Shakespeare lived, 
and in the unearthing of much interesting illus- 
tration of his works from the mould of antiquity ; 
but only those who have the taste of the liter- 
ary antiquary can accept these documents, which 



. MEMOIRS OF 

4 

have been so plentifully produced and so pitilessly 
printed, — extracts from parish registers and old 
account-books, inventories, including Hsts of the 
knives and spoons and pots and pans of the guz- 
zling aldermen of Stratford, last wills and testa- 
ments, leases, deeds, bonds, declarations, pleas, 
replications, rejoinders, surrejoinders, rebutters, 
and surrebutters, — as having aught to do with the 
life of such a man as William Shakespeare. They 
have, most of them, told us nothing, and only 
serve to mark and mock our futile efforts. For, 
although we do know something of Shakespeare's 
life, yet, compared with what we long to know, 
and what it would seem that we should be able to 
discover, our knowledge is, as knowledge often is, 
only the narrow boundary which marks the limit 
of a wide waste of ignorance. We do not know 
positively the date of Shakespeare's birth, or the 
house in which he first saw the light, or a single 
act of his life from the day of his baptism to the 
month of his obscure and suspicious marriage. 
We are equally ignorant of the date of that event, 
and of all else that befell him from its occurrence 
until we find him in London ; and when he went 
there we are not sure, or when he finally returned 
to Stratford. That he wrote the plays which bear 
his name we know ; but, except by inference, we 
do not know the years in which they were written, 
or even that in which either of them was first per- 
formed. We do not know that he laid his father 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



5 



or his mother in the grave, or stood by the dying 
bedside of his only son, or that he gave the sanc- 
tion of his presence to the marriage of his best- 
loved daughter. Hardly a word that he spoke has 
reached us, and not a familiar line from his hand, 
or the record of one interview at which he was 
present. Yet from the few facts which have been 
ascertained, and the vague and sometimes incon- 
gruous traditions which have been preserved con- 
cerning him, from the circumstances in which he 
must have been placed, and the mention of and 
allusion to him by some of his contemporaries, we 
may discover what manner of man this player-poet 
was, and learn, though imperfectly, his life's almost 
uneventful story. 

Warwickshire, in Old England, seems to have 
been the favorite haunt, if it were not the ances- 
tral soil, of a family whose name more than any 
other in our tongue sounds of battle and tells of 
knightly origin. It is possible, indeed, that Shake- 
speare is a corruption of some name of more peace- 
ful meaning, and therefore mayhap (so bloody was 
ambition's very lowest step of old) of humbler der- 
ivation ; for in the irregular, phonographic spell- 
ing of antiquity it appears sometimes as Chacksper 
and Shaxptir. But upon such an uncertain foun- 
dation it is hardly safe even to base a doubt ; and 
as the martial accents come down to us from the 
verge of the fourteenth century, we may safely 



5 MEMOIRS OF 

assume that a name thus spoken in chivalric days 
was not without chivalric significance * 

The Shakespeares, however, seem never to have 
risen to the rank of heraldic gentry, or to have es- 
tablished themselves firmly among the landhold- 
ers of the county. An old register of the Guild 
of Saint Anne of KnoUe in Warwickshire, which 
goes back to 1407, shows that, among many 

* The manner in which the name is spelled in the old records 
varies almost to the extreme capacity of various letters to pro- 
duce a sound approximating to that of the name as we pronounce 
it. It appears as Chacksper, Shaxpur, Shaxper, Schaksper, 
Schakesper, Schakspere, Schakespeire, Schakespeyr, Shagspere, 
Saxpere, Shaxpere, Shaxpeare, Shaxsper, Shaxspere, Shaxe- 
spere, Shakspere, Shakspear, Shakspeere, Schakspear, Shack- 
speare, Shackespeare, Shackespere, Shakspeyr, Skaksper, Shake- 
spere, Shakyspere, Shakeseper, Shakespire, Shakespeire, Shake- 
spear, Shakespeare, Shakaspeare ; and there are even other va- 
rieties of its orthography. But Shakespeare himself, and his 
careful friend Ben Jonson, when they printed the name, spelled it 
Shakespeare^ the hyphen being often used ; and in this form it is 
found in almost every book of their time in which it appeared. 
The final e is mere superfluity, and might with propriety be 
dropped ; but then we should also drop it from Greene, Mar- 
lowe, Peele, and other names in which it appears. There seems, 
therefore, to be no good reason for deviating from the orthog- 
raphy to which Shakespeare and his contemporaries gave a kind 
of formal recognition. As to the superior martial significance of 
this name to all others, we have, indeed, Breakspeare, Winspeare, 
Shakeshaft, Shakelance, Briselance, Hackstaff, Drawswerde, Cur- 
tlemace, Battleman, and some others of that sort ; but in this 
regard they all must yield to that which was an attribute of Mars 
himself as long ago as when Homer wrote : — 

MaiVero 6', ws or 'Aprj? eyxecnroXo?. 

Iliad, 0. 605. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 7 

Shakespeares in whose eternal welfare the broth- 
ers and sisters were led to concern themselves, 
there was a Prioress Isabella, whose soul was 
prayed for in 1505 (did player William know it 
when he wrote Measure for Measure ?), and a Lady 
(" Domina") Joan, who seems to have been living 
in 1527; but these trifling distinctions are the 
highest which have been discovered in connection 
with the name. 

Little need we care, however, what was the 
condition of those Shakespeares who were moul- 
dering in the earth before he without whom they 
would never have been heard of appeared upon it. 
Who his paternal grandfather was, we do not sure- 
ly know ; but there is hardly a doubt that he was 
one Richard Shakespeare, farmer, of Snitterfield, 
a village near Stratford on Avon. This Richard 
Shakespeare was a tenant of Robert Arden, a 
gentleman of ancient family but moderate estate, 
who lived at Wilmecote, three miles from Strat- 
ford, and who tilled a part of his patrimonial fields, 
and let a part to humbler husbandmen. The 
Ardens had been high among the gentry of War- 
wickshire since a time long before the Conquest, 
at which period Turchill de Arden was military 
governer, vice-comes (or viscount, then not an he- 
reditary dignity) of Warwick Castle. The family 
took its name from the wooded country, called 
Arden or Ardern, which lay in the northern and 
western part of that county, of which at one time 



8 



MEMOIRS OF 



they had no small part in their possession * Rob- 
ert Arden's branch of this family held lands in 
Snitterfield as far back, at least, as the early part 
of the fifteenth century; and he inherited his 
property there in direct succession. Two of the 
family had held places of some honor and respon- 
sibility in the household of King Henry VI L, — 
Sir John Arden, who was squire of the body, and 
his nephew Robert, who was page of the bed- 
chamber, to that shrewd and thrifty monarch, in 
whose service they both prospered. This John 
Arden did not escape great peril of marriage in 
his youth. For when he was about eighteen 
years old he was carried off bodily by a certain 
Richard Bracebridge of Kingsbury, who threat- 
ened him with his daughter Alice. As to which 
proposition, indeed, the lad's father had no small 
difference with the lady's. " Howbeit," says Dug- 
dale, who tells the story, " at length, by a refer- 
ence to Sir Simon Mountfort of Colshill, Knight, 
and Sir Richard Bingham (the Judge who then 
lived at Middleton), it was determined that the 
marriage should be solemnized betwixt them, and, 
in consideration of two hundred marks portion, 
a convenient jointure settled ; and also that, for 
the trespass done by the same Richard Brace- 

* The name Ardern, or Wood, was given at first to a forest- 
covered tract, which extended from the Avon to the Trent on the 
north, and the Severn on the west ; but it was retained at a very 
early period by that part only which lay within Warwickshire, 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. g 

bridge in so taking away the young gentleman, he 
should give to the before specified Walter Arden 
the best horse that could by him be chosen in 
Kingsbury Park." * 

Robert Arden, the page of the bedchamber, was 
grandfather to the Robert Arden who let his land 
to Richard Shakespeare, — a fact in which we 
may be sure that landlord and tenant took some 
pride, because, as we shall see, it was so well re- 
membered by their grandson. Of the family af- 
fairs and fortunes of Richard Shakespeare, nothing 
of interest is known ; but among the Shakespeares 
of Snitterfield were two, John and Henry, who 
were of the age which his sons might be, and who 
were brothers. There appears to have been but 
one family of the name in the place, and there is 
hardly room for doubt that they called him father. 
Henry Shakespeare's name will come up again ; 
but our concern is with the fortunes of his brother 
John, who appears to have been a man of thrift 
and capacity, and withal, as such men are apt to 
be, somewhat ambitious. Robert Arden had no 
son to inherit his name, his property, and his bed- 
chamber honors ; but he had seven daughters. 
The youngest of these, Mary, who seems to have 
been her father's favorite, John Shakespeare won 
to look on him with liking ; and so he married 
into the landlord's family, and allied his blood to 
that of the Ardens, with their high old English 

* Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, (fol., 1656,) p. 678. 



jQ MEMOIRS OF 

pedigree, stretching past the Conqueror away be- 
yond the reign of the Confessor. And to us of 
Endish race it is a matter of some interest to 
know that Shakespeare came of pure Enghsh 
blood, and not upon his mother's side of Norman, 
as some have concluded, because of her gentle 
and ancient lineage, and because, to use the words 
of one of them, Arden "sounds like a Norman 
name." But Arderm, which became Arden, is 
Celtic, and the name was given to the northern 
part of Warwickshire by the ancient Britons. 
And as there has even been a book written to 
show that Shakespeare was a Celt, it may be well 
to say here, that the Turchill * de Arden who is 
above mentioned was the first of his family who 
assumed a surname. His father s name was Al- 
win, which, like his own, was common enough of 
old among the English. He called himself, from 
the place in which he lived, Turchill de Ardern ; 
but the Normans called him Turchill de Warwick, 
because of the ofiice which he held under Edward 
the Confessor, and which the Conqueror allowed 
him to retain in spite of his English, or possibly 
Danish blood, because, like many other powerful 
Englishmen, he had not helped Harold, and did 
not oppose Duke William's title.f For it should 

* The ch is hard in this name, which was often written Tur- 
kill 

t " This Turchill resided here at Warwick, and had great pos- 
sessions in this county when William Duke of Normaiady invaded 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. jj 

always be remembered that, according to the loose 
dynastic notions of that day, the Norman bastard 
had some claim to the throne of England, and 
that it was the land of a divided people that he 
successfully invaded. From this people, who 
swallowed up their conquerors (like themselves, 
of Teutonic family), and imposed upon them their 
language, their customs, and their very mental 
traits, came the man in whose origin we have so 
great an interest ; and, to all intents and pur- 
poses, from this people only, even on the mother's 
side ; for the Ardens, in spite of their position, 
seem to have intermarried almost altogether with 
English families.* 

But to return to the humbler members of the 
Arden family, with whom we have more imme- 
diate concern. Whether Robert Arden consented 
to the marriage of the daughter who has given 

England and vanquisht King Harold ; and though he were then 
a man of especial note and power, yet did he give no assistance 
to Harold in that battail, as may be easily seen from the favor he 

received at the hands of the Conqueror And though he 

had so much respect from the victorious Norman as to possess 
these during his life, yet is it most clear that his son [Siward] 
enjoyed none of them as his heir, but by the favor of the Con- 
queror By which instance we may partly see how hardly 

the native English were dealt with ; viz., not to enjoy their in- 
heritances though they did not at all oppose the Conqueror's 
title, as by that trust committed to this Turchill for enlarging of 
Warwick Castle may be inferred." — Dugdale's Antiquities of 
Warwickshire, pp. 302, 303. 
* See Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, passim. 



J 2 MEMOIRS OF 

him a consequence in the eyes of posterity that 
he httle dreamed of, or whether the pedigree and 
the charms of the fair Mary were the only motives 
of John Shakespeare's choice, we cannot tell ; be- 
cause the wedding did not take place until after, 
and probably not until a full year after, the death 
of the young lady's father, by which event she be- 
came the inheritress of a pretty fortune in posses- 
sion and in reversion. Her father had bequeathed 
her a farm, of between fifty and sixty acres, in 
Wilmecote, called Ashbies, with a crop upon the 
ground, and £6 \is. ^d. in money, beside her 
share in what was left after legacies were paid ; 
and she had also a reversionary interest of far 
greater value than Ashbies in a stepmother's 
dower estate at Snitterfield, and in some other 
land at Wilmecote. The small sum of money set 
down to the young heiress (though in the end she 
doubtless had much more) may excite a smile, 
until we remember that money had then nearly 
six times its present value, and also how very little 
of actual money is got, or in fact needed, by agri- 
cultural people, even of comparatively large pos- 
sessions. 

Robert Arden died about the ist of Decem- 
ber, 1556, and the first child of John Shakespeare 
and Mary Arden was baptized on September 
i5j 155S. Joan Shakespeare received her name 
in the Church of the Holy Trinity, the parish 
church of Stratford on Avon, where her father 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 13 

had for some years been settled, and had become 
a prosperous and rising man. When he went 
thither, we do not know ; but he was there, and a 
householder in Henley Street, in 1552. His chief 
occupation seems to have been that of a glover ; 
for he is so styled in a law document issued in 
June, 1556. But he was also engaged in hus- 
bandry, and in company with another person ; 
for on the 19th of November in the same year 
he brought a suit against Henry Field, who un- 
justly kept from him eighteen quarters of barley. 
John Shakespeare's private and public fortunes 
advanced steadily and rapidly for twenty years 
from the time when he first appears in Stratford. 
It is true that he could not write his name ; 
but that was no disgrace, and little impediment, 
at a time when men much above him in social 
position were equally incapable. In 1556 he pur- 
chased the copyhold of two houses, one with a gar- 
den and croft, and one — that in Henley Street 
— with a garden only. In the course of the next 
year he acquired other property (how considera- 
ble for a man in his station, we have already seen) 
by his marriage. In this year he was regarded 
as of sufficient substance and importance to be 
marked as one of the jury of the court-leet, upon 
which he served soon afterward ; and at this date 
he was also appointed ale-taster, — an office of 
which, in spite of its humble name, the mighty 
consumption of that fluid in Old England must 



,. MEMOIRS OF 

have made the duties arduous, though pleasant, 
and the perquisites acceptable. He must have 
o-iven the buro:esses of Stratford cause to speak 
well of him over the Hquor that they loved ; for 
in 1557 they elected him one of their number, and 
they were only fourteen. The next year saw him 
a constable, and also the father of the girl who 
was called after him; and in 1559 he was re- 
elected one of the keepers of the Queen's peace 
in Stratford. About this time he appears to have 
dropped his glover's trade. It was, indeed, quite 
inconsistent with the notions of propriety in that 
day that the husband of an Arden and an heiress 
should be an artisan ; and this consideration could 
not but have its weight with the young burgess, 
now that he had land and beeves. The year 1561 
saw him made an afifeeror in the spring, and before 
the leaves began to fall, elected chamberlain. It 
was the duty of an affeeror to impose fines upon 
offenders who were punishable arbitrarily for mis- 
demeanors to which no express penalty was at- 
tached by statute, ■ — an office only to be filled by 
a man of discretion and integrity ; and as John 
Shakespeare, according to the date when he is 
with good reason believed to have been born, was 
at this time but thirty or thirty-one years old, his 
appointment to this office by the court indicates, 
not only soundness of character on his part, but 
somewhat unusual ripeness of judgment. He 
served as chamberlain two years, in the second 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



15 



of which another daughter was born to him, who 
was called Margaret. But Mary Arden's little 
family did not thrive like her husband's business. 
A few months lightened the young mother's arms, 
to lay a load upon her heart. Margaret as well 
Joan died in early infancy. 

To the now childless couple there came conso- 
lation and a welcome care in their first-born son, 
whom, on the 26th of April, 1564, they christened 
and called William. The Reverend (or, as he was 
then called, Sir) John Breechgirdle probably per- 
formed that office. Of the day of William Shake- 
speare's birth there exists, and probably there was 
made, no record. Why should it have been other- 
wise ? He was only the son of a Warwickshire 
yeoman, a burgess of a little rural town. And 
there were two score at least of children born that 
year in Stratford, who, in the eyes of their parents 
and of the good townsfolk, were of just as much 
importance, and of whose appearance in the world 
no other note was taken than such as tells us of 
his advent, — the entry of their christening in the 
parish register. As yet it was not the custom to 
record upon the blank leaves of the Bible the 
dates of life and death in humble families ; and 
had John Shakespeare owned a Bible, neither he 
nor even his higher-born wife could have written 
the words to read which, if they had endured, 
men would have made a pilgrimage. All unsus- 



j^ MEMOIRS OF 

pecting what he was whom she had borne and 
whom she cherished in her bosom, the mother of 
WilHam Shakespeare could have looked on him 
only as the probable inheritor of his father's little 
wealth, the possible recipient of his father's little 
honors, or mayhap, in some moment of high hope, 
the occupant of a position like that of his mater- 
nal grandfather. And had he become a peer in- 
stead of a player, the day of his birth might have 
been no less uncertain. Tradition says it was the 
23d of April ; and the old custom of christening 
the third day after birth, though it was far from 
universal, if it did not give rumor a hint, gives 
tradition some support. 

A court roll tells us that in 1552 John Shake- 
speare lived in Henley Street ; and another, that 
he bought the copyhold of a house in that street 
in 1556. Tradition points out a house in Henley 
Street, which we know belonged to John Shake- 
speare, as the birthplace of his illustrious son, 
who himself became its owner ; and the proba- 
bility of the truth of this tradition amounts, to all 
intents and purposes, to certainty. Neglect, sub- 
division, and base uses had reduced this house at 
the beginning of the present century to a very 
forlorn and unsightly condition. But as late as 
1769 it preserved enough of its original form to 
show that William Shakespeare was born and 
passed his childhood and his adolescent years in 
a home which was not only pretty and pictu- 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



17 



resque, but very comfortable and unusually com- 
modious for a man in his father's station in the 
middle of the sixteenth century. For in the reign 
of Elizabeth domestic architecture was in its in- 
fancy. Something had been done for the house- 
hold comfort of noblemen and gentlemen of large 
estate ; but almost nothing for the homes of that 
large class, composed, in the words of Agar, of 
those who have neither poverty nor riches, but 
food convenient for them, and which now gives 
the architect his chief employment. Old abbeys, 
priories, and granges, recently sequestered, and 
newly-built halls, were taking the place of cold, 
crumbling castles as dwellings for the rich ; and 
between these and the humble farm-house or 
village cot, often built, as the haughty Spaniard 
wrote in the reign of Elizabeth's sister, " of sticks 
and dirt," there was no middle structure. People 
corresponding in position to those whose means 
and tastes would now insure them as much com- 
fort in their homes as a king has in his palace, 
and even simple elegance beside, then lived in 
houses which in their best estate would seem at 
the present day rude, cheerless, and confined, to 
any man not bred in poverty. In 1847 the Shake- 
speare house passed into the hands of an associa- 
tion, under whose care it has been renovated ; but 
unfortunately, like some of the Shakespeare po- 
etry, not restored to a close resemblance to its first 
condition ; though that was perhaps in both cases 

B 



jg MEMOIRS OF 

impossible. Whether it was in this house that 
John Shakespeare and his wife, with their only 
precious child, stayed out the plague which vis- 
ited Stratford in 1564, or whether they fled to 
some uninfected place, we do not know. But 
families did not move freely in those days, or 
easily find house-room ; and on the 30th of Au- 
gust in that year John Shakespeare, as the Strat- 
ford register tells, was at a hall or meeting, held 
in a garden, probably for fear of infection. On 
this occasion he gave twelvepence for the relief 
of poor sufferers. The highest sum given was 
seven shillings and fourpence, the lowest, six- 
pence ; and there were but two burgesses who 
gave more than twelvepence. In September he 
gave sixpence more, and in October eighteen- 
pence. It may be assumed as quite certain, then, 
that the Shakespeares remained at Stratford dur- 
ing the plague, thus leaving William, like any 
other child, in peril of the pestilence. They 
passed through a period of fearful trial. The 
scourge made Stratford desolate. In six months 
one sixth of their neighbors were buried. But 
although around them there was hardly a house 
in which there was not one dead, there was a 
charm upon their threshold, and William Shake- 
speare lived. 

In the next year the father was chosen one of 
the fourteen aldermen of the town ; and in 1568 
he was made high bailiff, which office he filled 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. jg 

one year. He continued to prosper, and in 1570 
he took under his cultivation yet other lands, a 
farm called Ington, at the then goodly rent of 
£8. The year 1571 saw him chief alderman; 
and in 1575 he bought two freehold houses in 
Henley Street, with gardens and orchards. Wil- 
liam Shakespeare, therefore, at ten years of age, 
was the son of one of the most substantial and 
respected men of Stratford, who was one of its 
fourteen burgesses, and who had rapidly attained, 
step by step, the highest honors in the gift of his 
townsmen. He was styled Master Shakespeare, 
— a designation the manly style of which we have 
belittled into Mister, voiding it at the same time 
of its honorable significance. As high bailiff and 
chief alderman he sat as justice of the peace, and 
thus even became " worshipful." There has been 
much dispute as to what was his occupation at this 
time ; his glover's trade having been before aban- 
doned. Rowe. on Betterton's authority, says that 
he was "a considerable dealer in wool." John 
Aubrey the antiquary, or rather qtnd-tunc, says 
that he was a butcher ; in a deed dated 1579, ^^^ 
in another seventeen years later, he is called a 
yeoman ; and his name appears in a list of the 
gentlemen and freeholders of Barlichway Hun- 
dred in 1580. One of his fellow-aldermen, who 
was his predecessor in the office of bailiff, was a 
butcher ; but with our knowledge of his landed 
possessions and his consequent agricultural occu- 



20 MEMOIRS OF 

pation, we may be pretty sure that his nearest 
approach to that useful business was in having 
his own cattle killed on his own premises. Wool 
he mio-ht well have sold from the backs of his own 
flocks without being properly a wool-dealer. But 
what was his distinctive occupation is a matter 
of very little consequence, except as it may have 
affected the early occupation of his son, and of 
not much, even in that regard. He was plainly 
in a condition of life which secured that son the 
means of a healthy physical and moral develop- 
ment, and which, if he had lived in New England 
a century or a century and a half later, would 
have made him regarded, if a well-mannered man, 
as fit company for the squire and the parson and 
the best people of the township, and emboldened 
him perhaps to aspire to a seat in the General 
Court of the Colony. 

II. 

Stratford on Avon, where William Shakespeare 
was born and bred, is a place the antiquity of which 
is so great as to be uncertain. It was known as 
Stratford or Streatford, i. e. Street-ford, three hun- 
dred years before the Conquest Having its ori- 
gin probably in a wayside ale-house, boatman's 
cabin, or blacksmith's forge at a ford of the Avon 
River, on which it stands, it grew slowly to an 
insignificant size through long centuries. The 
Avon is one of those gently flowing rural streams 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 21 

which, unvexed by factories, undisturbed by traffic, 
and spanned by soUd bridges which have sounded 
to the tread of mail-clad men, make the soil of 
England rich and her landscapes beautiful. The 
ford, which was the nucleus of the town, and gave 
it half its name, was on the high road or street 
which gave the other half, and which stretches 
from the hamlet of Henley in Arden through 
Stratford across the Avon on towards London ; 
and thus the names of Shakespeare's native place, 
of the street on which stood his boyhood's home, 
and of his mother's family, were happily associated. 
Stratford is now a clean and quiet little place, 
containing about four thousand inhabitants, who 
seem to live comfortably enough without trade or 
manufactures. But in itself it has no attraction ; 
and towards the end of the reign of that shrewd 
and selfish termagant whom our forefathers called 
Good Queen Bess, it would have appeared to 
modern eyes unsightly. It then contained about 
fifteen hundred inhabitants, who dwelt chiefly in 
thatched cottages, which straggled over the ground, 
too near together for rural beauty, too far apart to 
seem snug and neighborly ; and scattered through 
the gardens and orchards around the best of these 
were neglected stables, cow-yards, and sheep-cotes. 
Many of the meaner houses were without chim- 
neys or glazed windows. The streets were cum- 
bered with logs and blocks, and foul with offal, 
mud, muck-heaps, and reeking stable refuse, the 



22 MEMOIRS OF 

accumulation of which the town ordinances and 
the infliction of fines could not prevent, even be- 
fore the doors of the better sort of people. The 
very first we hear of John Shakespeare himself, 
in 1552, is that he and a certain Humphrey Rey- 
nolds and Adrian Quiney ^^fecerunt stergtdna- 
rium" in the quarter called Henley Street, against 
the order of the court ; for which dirty piece of 
business they were " in misericordial^ as they well 
deserved. But the next year John Shakespeare 
and Adrian Quiney repeated the unsavory offence, 
and this time in company with the bailiff himself. 
This noisome condition of their streets, however, 
did not indicate a peculiar carelessness of dirt 
among the Stratford folk, at a time when in noble- 
men's houses, and even in palaces, the great halls, 
in which the household ate, were offensive, because 
the rushes with which the floors were strewed, by 
way of carpet, remained until they became mouldy, 
and beneath were bones and crusts, dogs' refuse, 
that were left there to decay. Launce gives us a 
glimpse of the habits and manners of those days, 
in that touching remonstrance which he addresses 
to Crab, upon his sad misbehavior when he was 
presented to Madam Silvia. But, with the strange, 
sad incongruity of early times, although squalor 
and discomfort thus pervaded the little town of 
Stratford, it had public structures beautiful and 
venerable, — such as now-a-days would not be 
erected in a place of fifty times its size. Now, a 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 23 

rich river-side city of fifty thousand inhabitants, 
nearly all of whom are comfortably, and a large 
proportion of them elegantly, housed, is content 
to be approached over a serviceable wooden bridge, 
resting on strong, but homely, stone piers ; the 
people worship according to their choice in vari- 
ous, perhaps pretty, but almost surely unpretend- 
ing churches ; if there be other market than the 
butchers' and hucksters' stalls scattered through 
the streets, it presents no other attractions than 
those of convenience and cleanliness ; and there 
is no private dwelling so superior and lofty, that 
it looks down upon the others round it as the 
homes of an inferior caste. But the little nest of 
plaster-walled, thatch-roofed cottages, most of them 
of a single floor, in which William Shakespeare 
was born, was approached by a noble stone bridge 
of fourteen arches, built at his own expense by 
Sir Hugh Clopton, a Stratford grandee and Mayor 
of London. The single parish church was a col- 
legiate foundation, and had had a chantry of five 
priests. In size it was superior to, and in general 
appearance not unlike, the largest church in the 
United States, its namesake Trinity, in New York. 
Its interior walls were decorated with rude but 
striking fresco paintings, representing, among oth- 
er subjects, some groups of the Dance Macabre, 
otherwise known as the Dance of Death ; and 
around its aisles and chancel end were monuments 
and effigies of departed great folk of that neigh- 



2A MEMOIRS OF 

borhood. There was the Chapel of the Guild of 
the Holy Cross, a fine, well-proportioned building 
of the earlier Tudor style of ecclesiastical archi- 
tecture, and some parts of it very much older, 
which, after the dissolution of religious houses by 
that conscientious Protestant, Henry VHL, had 
been used by the endowed and incorporated 
Grammar School of Stratford. The walls of this 
building were also decorated with paintings of 
sacred and historical subjects. In the open place, 
where the markets and the fairs were held, was a 
market cross with clock and belfry, from the steps 
of which the public crier performed his clamorous 
duty. Hard by the Chapel of the Guild was the 
Great House, or New Place, a grand mansion 
then a hundred years old, and more, built by Sir 
Hugh Clopton, of bridge memory, who lived and 
died there ; and near the Great House was the 
college, a fine monastic structure, which had been 
converted into a dwelling, and where lived one 
John a Combe, a wealthy gentleman who lent 
money upon interest and good security. From 
the narrow limits of the town the country stretched 
away, with gentle undulations, into a broad expanse 
of meadows and cornfields, bright with grass and 
grain, laced with little brooks and divided by the 
ever stone-bridged Avon, dotted with old clumps 
of trees, darkened with remnants of the ancient 
forest, enlivened with rustic hamlets, and adorned 
with parks and gardens. Clopton House, old, 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



25 



manorial, and substantial, the home of Sir Hugh's 
family, was only two miles off; and about four 
miles distant, on another road, was Charlecote, a 
new country-seat built by Sir Thomas Lucy, in 
the form of an E, to please his royal mistress, in- 
satiable of flattery. Only nine miles away was 
the county town, and the grand old feudal pile of 
Warwick Castle, dating back to the time of Alfred, 
of which William Shakespeare's maternal ancestor 
had been governor ; and five miles farther was 
Kenilworth, not quite so old, but not less magnifi- 
cent, where the Earl of Leicester, the Queen's 
favorite, was lately come as lord, and where within 
a few years he had spent £ 60,000, or according 
to our present measure of value $ 1,500,000, in 
making the place grand and beautiful. 

It was in such a town and amid such a country 
that William Shakespeare passed his early years ; 
and a glance at them has been worth our while ; 
for when he left them for a wider, busier, and more 
varied field of observation, marvellous as were the 
flexibility of his nature and the range and activity 
of his thought, his memory never lost the forms, 
nor did his soul cast off the influences, which had 
surrounded him in boyhood. As to the people of 
Stratford, they were much like others of their class 
and condition; simple folk, contentedly looking 
after their fields, their cattle, and their Httle trade, 
not troubling themselves about the great world 
which lay beyond their ken, but somewhat over- 



26 



MEMOIRS OF 



ready to take the law of one another upon small 
provocation, and strongly inclined to Puritanism. 
If they had one trait which seems more prominent 
than any other, it was a great capacity for liquor, 
which they tested on every possible occasion. 
The sums which they spent in providing them- 
selves and each other, and the strangers within 
their gates, with ale possets, claret, and sack and 
sugar, must have been no small proportion of the 
yearly outlay of the town. And yet perhaps in 
this respect they were but of their day and gen- 
eration. 

What was the education of William Shake- 
speare were a question indeed of interest to all 
reasonable creatures, and to those who think that 
education makes great men, of singular impor- 
tance. But of his teachers we know nothing, 
save of one, — his father. What were his moth- 
er's traits of character, and whether she had 
transmitted any of them to her son, we cannot 
tell. In which ignorance there is a kind of bliss to 
those people who have taken up the novel notion 
of the day, that men of mark derive their mental 
and their moral gifts, not from the father, but the 
mother. A fungus fancy, which must have sprung 
up while men could forget that Philip the Great 
of Macedon was ecHpsed by his son Alexander ; 
that there was a family of Scipios, all eminent ; 
that Hamilcar, one of the master generals and 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



27 



Statesmen of antiquity, would have come down to 
us as the great Carthaginian, had his abiUties and 
his fortunes not been surpassed by those of his 
son Hannibal ; that Charles Martel, a born king 
of men, who founded a great monarchy, was 
father to Pepin, who, with the new-created power 
which he inherited, inherited also the ability to 
preserve, to consolidate, and extend it, and whose 
son was the central figure of the Middle Ages, 
the imperial Charlemagne ; that Henry H., great 
after the fashion of his time and of the Planta- 
genets, transmitted all his energy, his craft, and 
his military genius to his son Richard the Lion- 
hearted, great also after the Plantagenet fashion, 
and who equalled him in most of his qualities 
and surpassed him in others ; that strong-minded, 
strong-willed Henry VHI. had his strong-minded, 
strong-willed daughter Elizabeth by that weak 
coquette, Anne Boleyn ; that his great Lord 
Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, was son to Sir 
Thomas More, Justice of the King's Bench, a 
man "of excellent wit and judgment," yet sur- 
passed by his son in these points, as in others ; 
that William, the great Prince of Orange, was 
succeeded by his son, Prince Maurice of Nassau, 
one of the two great captains of his day ; that 
William Pitt, called " the Great Commoner," who 
became Earl of Chatham, had for his son the 
other William Pitt, the greater commoner, while 
Chatham's most formidable rival, Henry Fox, 



2Z 



MEMOIRS OF 



who raised himself to be first Lord Holland, 
transmitted his talents, though not his titles or 
his lands, to his yet more eminent son, Charles 
James Fox ; and that Julius Scaliger would have 
been the first of scholars and critics, had not the 
splendid abilities of his son, Joseph Scaliger, made 
him the second. The Mendelssohn who came 
between Moses the scholar and Felix the musi- 
cian used smilingly to say that he was the son 
of the great Mendelssohn and the father of the 
great Mendelssohn. But this single case would 
prove nothing, even if it were true that the mid- 
dleman had a woman of mark for his wife. In- 
tellect, like gout, sometimes skips a generation, 
yet none the less follows the blood ; but some- 
times it is also inherited by immediate descent. 
The truth is, that upon the very interesting 
subject of transmitted qualities in the human 
race, we know almost nothing. But we do know 
that, in Shakespeare's own words, "good wombs 
have borne bad sons " ; and even a little observa- 
tion will discover that the converse is equally 
true, and that mothers, as well as fathers, of vi- 
cious character or feeble intellect have had chil- 
dren born to them upon whose moral integrity 
or mental endowments they have looked with 
perplexity and wonder.* 

* Whoever thinks this subject of sufficient interest and mo- 
ment to examine it, could not fail, I am sure, to add many similar 
and perhaps more striking examples to those above mentioned, 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



29 



Mary Arden may have been such a woman as 
it would please us to imagine the mother of Wil- 
liam Shakespeare ; but the limits of our knowl- 
edge oblige us to look upon him during childhood 
only under the tutelage of the father, whose good 
sense and strong character are shown by his rapid 
and steady rise of fortune and his advancement 
among his townsmen. His son was taught, we 
may be sure, to fear God and honor the King,* and, 
in the words of the Catechism, to learn and labor 
truly to get his own living, and do his duty in that 
state of life to which it had pleased God to call 
him ; for that was the sum and substance of the 

which have occurred to me only as I have been writing. In the 
brief annals of this Republic we find the two Adamses, John and 
John Quincy, father and son ; and Daniel Webster, the equal in 
intellectual capacity of any statesman of his generation, had for 
his sire a man of such singular ability and great force of charac- 
ter, that we cannot be sure that his son surpassed him, except by 
reason of a higher culture and a wider field of labor. From the 
memoir of his life by George Nesmith, we learn that he went 
through with honor an amount of public service rarely rendered 
by a single individual. He was a " Selectman " in Salisbury nine 
years, Town-Clerk three years, Representative four years. Senator 
four years, a Delegate to two State Constitutional Conventions, 
Elector for President when Washington was first chosen to that of- 
fice, a county magistrate thirty-five years, and a Judge of the Court 
of Common Pleas fifteen years, which office he held at the time 
of his death in 1806. Judge Webster also filled several offices in 
the village church, was elected chairman of the town-meeting in 
Salisbury forty-three times ; he served in the "Old French War," 
was a captain during the Revolution, and a colonel in 1784. 

* ^^ Moriamur pro rege nostra,^'' — as applicable to Elizabeth of 
England as to Maria Theresa of Hungary. 



-Q MEMOIRS OF 

home-teaching of our forefathers. For book in- 
struction, there was the Free Grammar School of 
Stratford, well endowed by Thomas Jolyffe in the 
reign of Edward IV., — forever therefore let his 
name be honored ! — where, unless it differed from 
all others of its kind, he could have learned Latin 
and some Greek. Some English too ; but not 
much, for English was held in scorn by the 
scholars of those days, and long after. The only 
qualifications for admission to this school were 
residence in the town, seven years of age, and 
abiUty to read. That the sons of the chief al- 
derman of Stratford went there, we could hardly 
have entertained a doubt, even had not Betterton 
learned the tradition that William had been bred 
there for some time. The masters of the school 
between 1572 and 1580 were Thomas Hunt, the 
parson of the neighboring village of Luddington, 
and Thomas Jenkins. Had either the English- 
man or the Welshman known when they breeched 
Shakespeare primus that he would have his re- 
venge in making the one sit for his portrait as 
Holofernes, and the other as Sir Hugh Evans, 
they would doubtless have taken out their satis- 
faction grievously in advance upon the spot. 
Could any one with power of conviction upon his 
tongue have told them what he was whom they 
were flogging, they would have dropped the birch 
and fled the school in awe unspeakable. There is 
better discipline, even for a dull or a vicious boy, 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. ^j 

than beating ; but, aside from question of the kind 
of training to which he was subjected, it was well 
perhaps for William Shakespeare that his masters 
knew only what he then was. Insight of the 
future would not always bring good fortune. 

At school Shakespeare acquired some knowl- 
edge of Latin and of Greek. For not only does 
Ben Jonson tell us that he had a little of the 
former and less of the latter, but his very frequent 
use of Latin derivatives in their radical sense 
shows a somewhat thoughtful and observant study 
of that language ; and although he has left fewer 
traces of his personal feelings and experience upon 
his works than any modern writer, he wrote one 
passage bearing upon this subject, and telling a 
plain story. Warwick, pleading to King Henry 
IV. in extenuation of the fondness of Prince Hal 
for wild associates, says : — 

"My gracious lord, you look beyond him quite. 
The Prince but studies his companions. 
Like a strange tongue ; wherein, to gain the language, 
'T is needful that the most immodest word 
Be look'd upon and learn'd ; which once attain'd, 
Your Highness knows, comes to no farther use, 
But to be known and hated." 

Second Part of King He7iry IV., Act IV. So. 4. 

Genius does not teach facts ; and every man who 
has himself been through the curriculum will see 
that the writer of that passage had surely, at least, 
passed through the same course before the days 
of expurgated classics. Jonson's phrase, " small 



^2 MEMOIRS OF 

Latin and less Greek," has been generally taken 
as meaning a mere smattering of the first, and 
nothing at all of the second ; but without suffi- 
cient reason, in my opinion. So does Edward 
Bathurst, B. D., in his memoir of his friend Arthur 
Wilson, the author of TAe Inconstant Ladie, writ- 
ten before 1646, say that "He had little skill in 
the Latin tongue and less in the Greek, a good 
readiness in the French and some smattering in 
the Dutch " ; * and yet, according to the same 
authority, Wilson had been a fellow-commoner of 
Trinity College, Oxford, where he had been regu- 
lar and studious ; and by his own account he 
could, at a pinch, speak Latin. f Little and much 
are comparative terms, the value of which can be 
determined only when we know the standard ac- 
cording to which they are used. Jonson's schol- 
arship, though not profound or various, seems to 
have been somewhat thorough and exact, and 
Bathurst was probably a man entirely given up 
to study. Both, we may be sure, would speak 
very lightly of the Latin and Greek of many men 
now-a-days who have well earned their degree of 
Master of Arts, and who can make good use of 
their academical acquirements. From report and 
from the evidence of his works we may reasonably 
conclude that WilHam Shakespeare read, as boys 

* " Character of Wilson," &c., in the Appendix to The In- 
cojistant Ladie. Ed. 1 814, p. 156. 

t " Observations of God's Providence in the Tract of my 
Life." Ibid., p. 128. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. ^3 

read, the easier classical Latin authors at Strat- 
ford Grammar School, and added to them the fa- 
vorite of that day, old Baptista Mantuan, whom 
he quotes in Loves Labor 's Lost, and that he re- 
tained enough of what he learned to have thereby 
a finer insight and more thorough mastery of 
English, if not to enjoy Virgil and Terence in the 
original. It is true, as Farmer has shown, that 
his works furnish evidence undeniable that in pre- 
paring himself to write upon Greek and Roman 
subjects he used the existing translations of the 
classics. But how many who for years have spent 
a part of every day in the study of Greek and 
Latin do the same, when college exercises are 
driven out of mind by the duties and labors for 
which college studies are but discipline, and turn 
laboriously from translation to original only when 
they wish to examine some particular passage 
closely. When, in The Taming of the Shrew, 
Tranio quotes a passage from Terence, he is in- 
accurate, and gives it not as it appears in the text 
of the Latin dramatist, but as it is misquoted in the 
Latin Grammar of William Lilly, whose accidence 
was in common use among our forefathers when 
Shakespeare was a boy, and held its place indeed 
much longer.* But, even if this showed that 

* " Quid agas ? nisi ut te redimas captum quam queas 
Minimo." Eumtchus, Act I. Sc. i. 

** Redime te captum quam queas minimo." 

The Taming of the Shrnv, Act I. Sc. i. 
2* C 



-, . MEMOIRS OF 

Shakespeare had not read Terence, which it does 
not, it surely does show that he had studied Mas- 
ter Lilly's book, which, be it remembered, is itself 
not in English, but in Latin, after the strange, 
pedantic fashion of the times when it was written. 
The scene between Sir Hugh and William, in 
The Meny Wives of Windsor, is as surely evi- 
dence of the writer's knowledge of the Latin gram- 
mar. " Shigulariter, noininativo, hie, hcec, hocl^ 
does not lie very far beyond the threshold of that 
elementary book ; but the question which elicits 
the declension, " What is he, William, that does 
lend articles 1 " by which the pragmatic parson 
tries to trip the poor boy up, although borrowed 
from Lilly, shows an intelligent acquaintance with 
the rudiments of the Latin language. 

Italian and French, we may be sure, were not 
taught at Stratford Grammar School ; but this is 
the most convenient occasion on which to say that 
Shakespeare appears to have learned something 
of them before he became too busy a man to 
study. It was probably in his earlier London 
years. Both these languages, and especially the 
former, were much in vogue among the cultivated 
people of that period. Shakespeare was likely to 
be thrown into the society of those who taught 
them ; and their instructions he might well re- 
quite, if he were sparing of money, by orders of 
admission to the theatre, which have been held 
to pay many a larger debt in later times. He 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



35 



has left several traces of a knowledge of Italian, 
which might be great or small, scattered through 
his plays ; but in two passages there are indica- 
tions of an acquaintance with two Italian poets, 
which, though hitherto passed by, cannot, I think, 
be mistaken. When Othello, in the dawning of 
his jealousy, chides Desdemona for being without 
the handkerchief, his first love-token, he tells her : 

" There 's magic in the web of it. 
A sibyl, that had number'd in the world 
The sun to course two hundred compasses, 
In her prophetic fury, sew'd the work." 

The phrase "prophetic fury" is so striking, so 
picturesque, and so peculiar, that in itself it ex- 
cites remark, and remains upon the memory as 
the key-note of the passage ; but when we regard 
it as applied to mood in which a web was woven 
or embroidered, all these characteristics are much 
enhanced. Now in the Orlando Furioso there is 
the following passage about a tent which Cas- 
sandra gave to Hector, and which descended 
through Cleopatra to Constantine, who gave it 
to Melissa : — 

" Eran de gli anni appresso che duo milia 
Che fu quel ricco padiglion trapunto. 
Una donzella de la terra d' Ilia 
Ch' avea 11 furor profetico congiunto 
Con studio di gran tempo e con vigilia, 
Lo fece di sua man, di tutto punto." * 

Canto XLVI. St. 80. 

* Thus rendered by Rose : — 

*' Two thousand tedious years were nigh complete, 
Since this fair work was fasioned by the lore 



^5 MEMOIRS OF 

Here we have the identical thought, and, in their 
ItaUan form, the identical v^ord^, ftiror prof etico, 
used in the description of a woman, sibyl-like, 
if not a sibyl, weaving a cloth of magic virtues. 
There is, too, in both passages, the idea of a great 
lapse of time, though in one it is appHed to the 
weaver and in the other to the thing woven. It 
would seem impossible that this striking coinci- 
dence of thought, of incident, and of language 
could be merely accidental ; and there was no 
other translation of the Orlando Furioso into 
English in Shakespeare's time than Sir John 
Harrington's, pubhshed in 1591, and in that the 
phrase "prophetic fury," or any one like it, does 
not occur.* 

Again, when lago, distilling his poison into 
Othello's ears, utters the often quoted lines, — 

" Who steals my purse, steals trash ; 't is something, nothing ; 
'T was mine, 't is his, and has been slave to thousands ; 
But he that filches from me my good name 
Robs me of that which not enriches him, 
And makes me poor indeed," — 

he but repeats with little variation this stanza of 
Berni's Orlando Innamorato, of which poem, to 
this day, there is no English version : -— 

Of Trojan maid, warmed with prophetic heat ; 

Who 'mid long labor, and 'mid vigil sore, 
With her own fingers all the storied sheet 

Of the pavilion had embroidered o'er." 

* See Harrington's Orlajtdo Furioso in English^ Canto XLVI. 
St. 64, ed. 1 59 1. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 37 

" Chi ruba un corno un cavallo un anello, 
E simil cose, ha qualche discrezione, 
E potrebbe chiamarsi ladroncello ; 
Ma quel che ruba la reputazione, 
E de 1' altrui fatiche si'fa bello, 
Si puo chiamare assassino e ladrone ; 
E tanto pill odio e pena e degno 
Quanto piii del dover trapassa il segno." * 

Canto LL St. i. 

Now, when we consider that the faculty and 
habit of assimilating what he read was one of 
Shakespeare's mental traits, and that both these 
passages of his, so identical in thought and in 
expression with others in two Italian poets who 
wrote on kindred subjects, occur in a play founded 
upon an Italian novel which had not been ren- 
dered into our language in his day, can we reason- 
ably doubt that he was sufficiently an Italian 
scholar to read Ariosto, Berni, and Giraldi Cin- 
thio in the original ? f 

* As no English translation has been made of the Orlando In- 
namorato, I must ask the reader who cannot command the origi- 
nal to be content with this rendering of the above stanza : — 

The man who steals a horn, a horse, a ring. 
Or such a trifle, thieves with moderation, 

And may be justly called a robberling ; 
But he who takes away a reputation, 

And pranks in feathers from another's wing, 
His deed is robbery, assassination. 

And merits punishment so much the greater 

As he to right and truth is more a traitor. 

t Mr. Halliwell in his Life of William Shakespeare, p. 190, 
quotes from a MS. entitled The New Metamorphosis ^ which was 



^g MEMOIRS OF 

The consideration of this subject has diverted 
us from the course of Shakespeare's Ufe, and has 
given us an anticipatory glance of one of its few 
landmarks; which, however, are so well known, 
that I have not sought and shall not seek solici- 
tously to follow them in due order. 

John Shakespeare's prosperity hardly lasted to 
his eldest son's adolescence. Betterton heard a 
tradition, that the narrowness of his circum- 
stances and the need of his son's assistance at 
home forced him to withdraw William from 
school ; and the evidence of town registers and 
of court records corroborates the story. In 1578, 
when the young poet was but fourteen years old, 
his father mortgaged the farm at Ashbies for 
forty pounds to Edmund Lambert. That this 
step was taken, not to raise money for a venture 
in trade or for a new purchase, but on account of 
serious embarrassment, is shown by a concur- 

written "by J. M. Gent. 1600," the following lines, which he, not 
having Berni's stanza in mind, naturally regards as an imitation 
of the passage of Othello in question, and therefore, of course, 
as evidence that that play was written before the date of the 
MS. : — 

" The highwayman that robs one of his purse 
Is not soe bad ; nay, these are ten times worse ! 
For these doe rob men of their pretious name, 
And in exchange give obloquy and shame." 

But J. M.'s lines are, on the contrary, a manifest imitation of 
Berni's, rather than Shakespeare's ; and if they have any bear- 
ing at all upon the question of the date of Othello, (which in my 
opinion they have not,) they show that it was written after 1600. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



39 



rence of significant events, all pointing in the 
latter direction. In the same year when his fel- 
low-aldermen assessed themselves 6s. Sd. each to- 
wards the equipment of pikemen, billmen, and 
an archer, he is set down as to pay only 3^-. 4d. 
Again in that year when the aldermen paid 4d. 
each a week for the relief of the poor, it was or- 
dered that John Shakespeare should not be taxed 
to pay anything. In March, 1578-9, the inhab- 
itants of Stratford having been assessed for the 
purchase of arms, he failed to contribute his 
quota. In October, 1579, ^^ sold his wife's share 
in the Snitterfield property, and in 1580 a rever- 
sionary interest in the same, — the latter for forty 
pounds. Six years afterwards his little wealth 
had found such wings that, a distraint having 
been issued against him, the return made upon it 
was, that he had nothing upon which to distrain ; 
whereupon a writ of capias was issued against his 
person, — he who as high bailiff had but a short 
time before issued such writs against others.* 
He seems even to have been in hiding about this 
time ; for the town records show that in 1586 he 
was deprived of his alderman's office, the reason 
given being that " Mr. Shaxpere dothe not come 
to the halles when they be warned, nor hathe not 
done of longe tyme " ; and it appears, on the 
same authority, that he had thus absented him- 

* The Shakespeare Society of London was in possession of 
two such writs. 



.^ MEMOIRS OF 

self for seven years. But before March of the 
next year he had been arrested, and was impris- 
oned or in custody, doubtless for debt, according 
to the barbarous and foolish practice of which our 
brethren in the mother country have not yet rid 
themselves. This we know by his suing out a 
writ of habeas corpus in the Stratford Court of 
Record. Perhaps he suffered this indignity on 
account of his kindness to his brother Henry, be- 
fore mentioned, who had much money trouble, 
and for whom he became surety to one Nicholas 
Lane for ten pounds. Henry not having duly 
paid this sum, Lane sued John Shakespeare for 
it in February, 1587. To follow his sad fortunes 
yet further, in 1592 a commission, upon which 
were Sir Thomas Lucy and Sir Fulke Greville 
with six others, which had been appointed to in- 
quire into the conformity of the people of War- 
wickshire to the established religion, with a 
special eye to Jesuits, priests, and recusants, re- 
ported many persons "for not comming moneth- 
lie to the churche, according to hir Majestie's 
lawes " ; and among them was John Shakespeare. 
But the commissioners specially note as to him 
and eight others, that " it is sayd that these last 
nine coom not to churche for fear of processe for 
debtte." 

Thus low in fortune and estate had sunk the 
once prosperous high bailiff of Stratford, in the 
veins of whose children ran the blood of men who 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



41 



had owned half the county through which he 
skulked, a bailiff-hunted debtor. Those very chil- 
dren added largely to his anxiety and his cares. 
For since Margaret's death six had been born to 
him: William; Gilbert, born in 1566; a second 
Joan, in 1569; Anne, in 1571 ; Richard, in 1573-4; 
and Edmund, in 1580. Rowe, upon Betterton's 
authority, says that John Shakespeare had " ten 
children in all." But Betterton only reported 
tradition ; and the Stratford parish register, bet- 
ter authority on such a point, records the baptism 
of no more than eight, two of whom, as we have 
seen, died before their father reached the height 
of his prosperity ; and Anne died at the begin- 
ning of his troubles. At her burial there were 
both pall and bell, for which it has been discovered 
that eight pence were paid, while other children 
buried in the same year (1579) were honored with 
only half the ceremony, the bell, at half the price. 
This has been accepted as evidence that John 
Shakespeare had money to spare. He doubtless 
meant that it should be so regarded ; and he de- 
ceived even posterity. As long as funeral cere- 
monies are deemed important, they will be the 
last as to which poverty will compel retrench- 
ment. In 1579 John Shakespeare had not aban- 
doned the struggle to keep up appearances. Had 
his purse been fuller, or his position lower, he 
might have been willing to save the four pence. 
But a few years later five little mouths to feed, 



.2 MEMOIRS OF 

five little backs to clothe, were quite enough to 
harass the poor man who could not keep his 
own body out of a debtor's prison, and to cause 
him to abandon any ambitious projects which he 
might have formed for his eldest son, and call him 
from his studies to contribute something to his own 
support, and perhaps to that of the family. 

The traditions of the townsfolk upon this sub- 
ject were surely therefore in the main well 
founded, though in their particulars they were 
discordant. Rowe, speaking for Betterton, says, 
that "upon his leaving school he seems to have 
given entirely into that way of living which his 
father proposed to him," which, according to the 
same authority, was that of a dealer in wool. 
Gossiping John Aubrey, who says that John 
Shakespeare was a butcher, adds : " I have been 
told heretofore by some of the neighbors that 
when he was a boy he exercised his father's 
trade ; but when he kill'd a calfe he wold 
doe it in a high style, and make a speeche." 
Aubrey, who died about 1700, probably received 
this precious information from the same source 
through which an old parish clerk of Stratford, 
who was living in 1693, and was then more than 
eighty years old, derived a similar story, that 
Shakespeare had been "bound apprentice to a 
butcher." Aubrey also records, on the authority 
of an unknown Mr. Beeston, that William Shake- 
speare " understode Latin pretty well, for he had 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 43 

been many years a schoolmaster in the country." 
The only point upon which these loose traditions 
are of importance is that upon which they all con- 
form to probability, that William Shakespeare was 
obliged to leave school early and earn his living.* 

* Isolated passages in Shakespeare's plays have been gravely 
brought forward to sustain each of these traditions as to his early 
occupation, — surely a wise and penetrative method of getting at 
the truth in such a matter. Let us see. When we read a pas- 
sage like this in King Henry the Sixth, — 

" Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh. 
And sees fast by the butcher with an axe, 
But will suspect 't was he that made the slaughter ? " — 

what way to avoid concluding that the writer had been himself a 
butcher ? Consider, too, the profound inner significance of this 
passage in Love's Laboicr 'j Lost, in which Holofernes describes 
Sir Nathaniel : " He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too 
odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it. . . . He draw- 
eth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his 
argument." Is there not a goodly part of the wool-stapler's art, 
as well as of the art of rhetoric, compressed into that last sen- 
tence by the power of Shakespeare's genius ? And is it not thus 
made clear that he was practically initiated into the mysteries 
of long and short staple before he wrote this, one of the earliest 
of his plays t But, again, ponder the following lines in King 
Henry the Sixth, written when the memory of his boyish days 
was freshest, and see evidence that both these traditions were 
well founded : — 

" So, first the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece. 
And next his throat, unto the butcher's knife." 

Certainly these lines could have been written only by a man who 
was both the son of a considerable dealer in wool, and a butcher, 
who killed calves in high style, making a speech. Who, appre- 
ciating rightly the following passage in Hamiet, can have a doubt 
about this matter .'' 



^ MEMOIRS OF 

Utterly ruined, however, as John Shakespeare 
was, he seems never to have been driven out of 
his house in Henley Street, or to have lost his 
property in it ; though how this could be in the 
case of a man as to whom the return upon an exe- 
cution was "no effects," it is not easy to conjecture. 

** Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well 
When our deep plots do fall ; and that should teacn us 
There 's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
Rough-hew them how we will." 

Upon which thus discourse two acute and learned commentators. 
George Steevens speaks : — 

" Dr. Farmer informs me that these words are merely techni- 
cal. A woolman, butcher, and dealer in skewers lately observed 
to him that his nephew (an idle lad) could only assist him in mak- 
ing them. *He could rough-hew them, but I was obliged to 
shape their ends ! ' To shape the ends of wool-skewers, i. e. to 
point them, requires a degree of skill ; any one can rough-hew 
them. Whoever recollects the profession of Shakespeare's 
father will admit that his son might be no stranger to such 
terms. I have frequently seen packages of wool pinn'd up with 
skewers." 

What a revelation at once of the unknown outer and that 
more mysterious inner life of Shakespeare ! Lucky wool-man, 
butcher, and dealer in skewers ! to furnish thus a comment upon 
the great philosophical tragedy, and proof that you and its 
author were both of a trade. Fortunate Farmer, to have heard 
the story ! and most sagacious Steevens, to have penetrated its 
hidden meaning, recollecting felicitously that you had seen pack- 
ages of wool pinned up with skewers ! But, O wisest, highest, 
and deepest-minded Shakespeare ! to have remembered, as you 
were propounding, Hamlet-wise, one of the great unsolvable 
mysteries of life, the skewers that you, being an idle lad, could 
but rough-hew, leaving to your careful father the skill-requiring 
task of shaping their ends ! — ends without which they could not 
have bound together the packs of wool with which you loaded 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



45 



But what was William Shakespeare doing in all 
those years through which his father was descend- 
ing into the vale of poverty, whither we have 
followed him to the lowest depth ? We have 
passed over thereby some events of great impor- 
tance to the son, whom his father's trials seem not 

carts at the door in Henley Street, or have penetrated the veal of 
the calves you killed in such high style and with so much elo- 
quence, and which loaded the tray you daily bore on your shoul- 
der to the kitchen-door of New Place, yet unscheming to become 
its master ! 

Yet I would not insist too strongly upon this evidence that 
Shakespeare's boyhood was passed as a butcher's and wool- 
stapler's apprentice ; because I venture to think that I have dis- 
covered like evidence in his works that their author was a tailor. 
For in the first place I have found that the word "tailor" ap- 
pears in his plays no less than twenty-seven times ! " Measures" 
occurs nearly thrice as often ; " shears," no less than six times ; 
"thimble," thrice; "goose," no less than twenty-seven times! 
And when we see that in all his thirty-seven plays " cabbage " 
occurs but once, and then with the careful explanation that it 
means roots, and is "good cabbage," must we not regard such 
reticence upon this tender point as touching confirmation of the 
theory sartorical ? His plays abound with like evidence. He 
says of the use to which his favorite hero Prince Hal will put 
the manners of his wild companions, that 

" Their memory 
Shall as a patter7t or a meastire live 
By which his Grace must meet the lives of others." 

He makes one of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, as his severest 
censure of the other, reproach him with being badly dressed : — 

" Ruffian, let go that rude uncivil touch, 
Thou friend of an ill fashion I " 

And how unmistakably he gives us in Hamlet a reminiscence of 
a highly ornamented style of children's clothing : — 



46 



MEMOIRS OF 



to have chastened into sobriety. In estimating 
Shakespeare's character, the fact that he left 
among his neighbors the reputation of having 
been somewhat irregular in his youth cannot be 
lightly set aside. Nor is it at all strange that such 
a reputation should have been attained in the 
early years of a man of his lively fancy, healthy 
organization, and breadth of moral sympathy. It 
is from tradition that we learn that during his 
father's misfortunes he was occasionally engaged 
in stealing deer ; but we know on good evidence 
that about that time he also got himself married 
in no very creditable fashion. While he was 
sowing his wild oats in the fields round Strat- 
ford, he naturally visited the cottage of Richard 
Hathaway, a substantial yeoman of Shottery, who 
seems to have been on terms of friendship with 
John Shakespeare. This Richard Hathaway had, 

" The canker galls the infants of the Spring 
Too oft before their buttotts be disclosed." 

What more natural than that a tailor, vexed with the memories 
of peevish customers, should make the incensed Northumber- 
land compare himself to a man who is " impatient of his fit " } 
And yet this evidence, so strong and cumulative, must not be too 
much relied upon. For who but a publisher, anxious about the 
health and the progress in her work of a popular authoress, 
could have written thus in Twelfth Night ? 

" Lady, you are the cruell'st she alive. 
If you will lead these graces to the grave 
And leave the world no copy.'''' 

The subject expands inimitably before me, and I resign it to 
the followers of Farmer and of Steevens, and to the Germans. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



47 



among other children, a daughter named Anne, 
who might have dandled William Shakespeare 
in his infancy upon her knee ; for she was eight 
years old when he was born, in 1564. Whether 
or no Anne Hathaway had a fair face and a win- 
ning way which spontaneously captivated William 
Shakespeare, or whether he yielded to arts to 
which his inexperience made him an easy victim, 
we cannot surely tell. But we do know that she, 
though not vestally inclined, as we shall see, re- 
mained unmarried until 1582, and that then the 
woman of twenty-six took to husband the boy of 
eighteen. They were married upon once asking 
of the banns ; and the bond given to the Bishop 
of Worcester for his security in licensing this de- 
parture from custom was given in that year, on 
the 28th day of November.* About those days 

* " Noverint universi per praesentes nos ffulconem Sandells de 
Stratford in comitatu Warwici, agricolam, et Johannem Rychard- 
son ibidem agricolam, teneri et firmiter obligari Ricardo Cosin 
generoso, et Roberto Warmstry notario publico, in quadraginta 
libris bonas et legalis monetae Angliae, solvend. eisdem Ricardo 
et Roberto, hasred. execut. vel assignat. suis, ad quam quidem 
solucionem bene et fideliter faciend. obligamus nos et utrumque 
nostrum per se pro toto et in solid, haered. executor, et admi- 
nistrator, nostros firmiter per praesentes sigillis nostris sigillat. 
Dat. 28 die Novem. anno regni dominae nostrae Eliz. Dei gratia 
Angliae, Franc, et Hiberniae reginae, fidei defensor, &c. 25. 

"The condicion of this obligacion ys suche, that if herafter 
there shall not appere any lawfull lett or impediment, by reason 
of any precontract, consangui[ni]tie, affinitie, or by any other law- 
full meanes whatsoever, but that William Shagspere one thone 
partie, and Anne Hathwey of Stratford in the dioces of Worces- 



48 



MEMOIRS OF 



there was great need that Anne Hathaway' 
should provide herself with a husband of some 
sort, and that speedily ; for in less than five 
months after she obtained one she was delivered 
of a daughter. The parish register shows that 
Susanna, the daughter of William and Anne 
Shakespeare, was baptized May 26th, 1583. 

There have been attempts to turn aside the 
obvious bearings of these facts upon the character 
of Anne Hathaway. But it is a stubborn and un- 
wise idolatry which resists such evidence as this, 
— an idolatry which would exempt Shakespeare, 

ter, maiden, may lawfully solennize matrimony together, and in 
the same afterwardes remaine and continew like man and wiffe, 
according unto the lawes in that behalf provided : and moreover, 
if there be not at this present time any action, sute, quarrell, or 
demaund, moved or depending before any judge ecclesiasticall or 
temporall, for and concerning any suche lawfull lett or impedi- 
ment : and moreover, if the said William Shagspere do not pro- 
ceed to solemnizacion of mariadg with the said Anne Hathwey 
without the consent of hir frindes : and also, if the said William 
do, upon his owne proper costes and expences, defend and save 
harmles the right reverend Father in God, Lord John Bushop of 
Worcester, and his offycers, for licensing them the said William 
and Anne to be maried together ^vith once asking of the bannes 
of matrimony betweene them, and for all other causes which may 
ensue by reason or occasion thereof, that then the said obligacion 
to be voyd and of none effect, or els to stand and abide in full 
force and vertue." 

To this instrument are attached the rude marks of Sandells 
and Richardson, and a seal which bears two letters, R, and 
another, imperfect, which seems to be an H. This seal is conjec- 
tured to be that of the bride's father, who at the execution of the 
bond had been dead five months. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. ^g 

and not only him, but all with whom he became 
connected, from human passion and human frailty. 
That temperament is cruel, and that morality 
pharisaic, which treats all cases of this kind 
with inexorable and indiscriminating severity, and 
that judgment outrageously unjust which visits all 
the sin upon the weaker and already suffering 
party. Yet if in the present instance it must be 
that one or other of this couple seduced the other 
into error, perhaps where a woman of twenty-six 
is involved with a boy of eighteen, for the honor 
of her sex the less that is said about the matter 
the better. Besides, Anne Hathaway rests under 
the implied reproach of both the men whose good 
opinion was to her of gravest moment. Her 
father, like Mary Arden's, had died about a year 
before her marriage ; but while Mary Arden had 
special legacies, and was assigned to the honorable 
position of executrix by her father's will, Anne 
Hathaway was passed over even without mention 
by her father, who yet carefully, and minutely re- 
membered all but one of his other children. And 
to look forward again, — which we well may do, 
for Shakespeare's wife will soon pass entirely from 
our sight, — when her husband was giving in- 
structions for his will, he left her only his second- 
best bed, the one that probably she slept upon. 
It is true, as Mr. Knight has pointed out, that she 
was entitled to dower, and that so her livelihood 
was well provided for ; it is true also, that a bed 

3 D 



-Q MEMOIRS OF 

with its furniture was in those days no uncommon 
bequest. But William Shakespeare's will was one 
of great particularity, leaving little legacies to 
nephews and nieces, and also swords and rings 
as mementoes to friends and acquaintance ; and 
yet his wife's name is omitted from the document 
in its original form, and only appears by an after- 
thought in an interlineation, as if his attention 
had been called to the omission, and for decency's 
sake he would not have the mother of his children 
unnoticed altogether. The lack of any other be- 
quest than the furniture of her chamber is of small 
moment in comparison with the slight shown by 
that interlineation. A second-best bed might be 
passed over ; but what can be done with second- 
best thoughts.? And second-best, if good at all, 
seem to have been all the thoughts which Shake- 
speare gave her ; for there is not a line of his 
writing known which can be regarded as ad- 
dressed to her as maid or matron. Did ever poet 
thus slight the woman that he loved, and that too 
during years of separation ? 

The cottage in which Anne Hathaway lived is 
still pointed out in Shottery. It is a timber and 
plaster house, like John Shakespeare's, standing 
on a bank, with a roughly paved terrace in front. 
The parlor is wainscoated high in oak ; and in the 
principal chamber is an enormous and heavily 
carved bedstead. Though a rustic and even rude 
habitation when measured by our standard, it was 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



51 



evidently a comfortable home for a substantial 
yeoman in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and is 
picturesque enough for the cradle of a poet's love. 
But it never can be looked upon without sadness 
by those who rightly estimate the sorrow and the 
shame which there were born to William Shake- 
speare, — sorrow and shame which not all the 
varied successes of his after-life could heal and 
obliterate, and his sufferings from which find fre- 
quent expression both in his plays and sonnets. 
True, he was of all poets the most dramatic, and 
therefore the most self-forgetful ; but his trouble 
he did not forget. His works are full of passages, 
to write which, if he had loved his wife and hon- 
ored her, would have been gall and wormwood to 
his soul ; nay, which, if he had loved and honored 
her, he could not have written. The nature of 
the subject forbids the marshalling of this ter- 
rible array ; but did the " flax-wench " whom he 
uses for the most degrading of all comparisons do 
more "before her troth-plight" than the woman 
who bore his name and whom his children called 
mother ? * It is not a question whether his judg- 
ment was justifiable, but of what he thought and 
felt. 

And even if Anne Hathaway's fair fame, if in- 
deed it was ever fair, remained untarnished, the 
marriage at eighteen of such a man as her boy 
husband proved is one of the saddest social events 

* T/ie Winter's Tale, Act I. Sc. 2. 



C2 MEMOIRS OF 

that can be contemplated. Not because it was 
sino-ular in all its circumstances or its conse- 
quences ; for, alas ! in most of them it is too com- 
mon. A youth whose person, whose manner, and 
whose mental gifts have made him the admired fa- 
vorite of some rural neighborhood, captivated ere 
he is well a man by some rustic beauty, or often by 
his own imagination, married and a father before he 
should be well beyond a father's care, or bound as 
much in honor, according to the matrimonial code, 
as if he were married, developing into a man of 
mark and culture, attaining social position and 
distinction which would make him the welcome 
suitor of the fairest and most accomplished woman 
of the circle into which he has risen by right of 
worth and intellect, yet tied to one who is inferior 
to him in all respects, except perhaps in simple 
truthfulness, and who does not — poor creature, 
who cannot if she would — keep pace with him ; 
and all this the consequence of a boyish passion, 
which opposition might have confirmed, but which 
tact and a little time — so little ! — might easily 
have dissipated : this case, so pitiable ! — so pitiable 
for both parties, even most pitiable for her, — we 
see too often. But add to all this that the man was 
William Shakespeare, and that he met his fate at 
only eighteen years of age, and that the woman 
who came to him with a stain upon her name was 
eight years his senior, and could we but think of 
their life and leave out the world's interest in him, 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



53 



should we not wish that one of them, even if it 
were he, had died before that ill-starred marriage ? 
But chiefly for him we grieve ; for a woman of her 
age, who could so connect herself with a boy of 
his, was either too dull by nature or too callous by 
experience to share his feelings at their false, un- 
natural position. Who can believe that the well- 
known counsel upon this subject which he put into 
the Duke Orsino's mouth in Twelfth NigJit * was 
not a stifled cry of anguish from his tormented, 
over-burdened soul, though he had left his tor- 
ment and his burden so far behind him t It is 
impossible that he could have written it without 
thinking of his own experience ; the more, that 

* " Duke. Thou dost speak masterly : 

My life upon 't, young though thou art, thine eye 
Hath stay'd upon some favor that it loves ; 
Hath it not, boy .? 

Vio. A little, by your favor. 

Dicke. "What kind of woman is 't ? 

Vio. Of your complexion. 

Duke. She is not worth thee then. What years, i' faith .'' 

Vio. About your years, my lord. 

Duke. Too old, by Heaven ! Let still the woman take 
An elder than herself; so wears she to him, 
So sways she level in her husband's heart. 
For, boy, however we do praise ourselves. 
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm. 
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, 
Than women's are. 

Vio. I think it well, my lord. 

Duke. Then let thy love be younger than thyself, 
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent." 

Act IL Sc. 4. 



-. MEMOIRS OF 

54 

the seeming lad to whom it is addressed is about 
his years, and the man who utters it about Anne 
Hathaway's, at the time when they were married. 
After considering all that has been said, which 
is quite all that can reasonably be said, about the 
custom of troth-plight in mitigation of the circum- 
stances of Shakespeare's marriage, I cannot regard 
the case as materially bettered. It has been urged 
that Shakespeare put a plea for his wife into the 
mouth of the Priest in Twelfth Night, where the 
holy man says to Olivia that there had passed be- 
tween her and Sebastian 

" A contract of eternal bond of love, 
Confirm'd by mutual joinder of your hands, 
Attested by the holy close of lips, 
Strengthen'd by interchangement of your rings ; 
And all the ceremony of this compact 
Sealed in my function, by my testimony." 

Act V. Sc. I. 

But what this was is shown by Olivia's language 
at the time when it took place, in a passage which 
the apologists leave out of sight. 

*' Blame not this haste of mine. If you mean well. 
Now go with me, and with this holy man, 
Into the chantry by : there, before him, 
And underneath that consecrated roof, 
Plight me the full assurance of your faith ; 
That my most jealous and too doubtful soul 
May live at peace. He shall conceal it, 
Whiles you are willing it shall come to note ; 
What time we will our celebration keep 
According to my birth. — What do you say ? " 

Act IV. Sc. t,. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



55 



This plainly was a private marriage, in church and 
by a priest ; indissoluble and perfect, except that 
it lacked consummation and celebration according 
to the lady's birth. As to troth-plight, its import 
depends entirely upon that to which troth is plight- 
ed. The closing words of the binding declaration 
in the marriage ceremony of the Church of Eng- 
land are, " and thereto I plight thee my troth." 

The marriage between William Shakespeare and 
Anne Hathaway took place in December, 1582. 
The ceremony was not performed in Stratford ; 
and no record of it has been discovered. But 
there is a tradition in Luddington, a little village 
not far off, that it took place there ; and the story 
derives some support from the fact that Thomas 
Hunt, Shakespeare's schoolmaster, was curate of 
that parish. Susanna, the first child born in this 
wedlock, was baptized May 26th, 1583 ; and Ham- 
net and Judith, twins, were baptized February 2d, 
1584-5. William Shakespeare and his wife had 
no other children ; and soon after the latter event 
their household married life was interrupted for 
many years by the departure of the youthful hus- 
band from Stratford. The eldest son of a ruined 
man just degraded from office, having four broth- 
ers and sisters younger than himself, and a wife 
and three children upon his hands before he was 
twenty-one, there were reasons enough for him to 
go, as he did, to London, if he could get money 
there more rapidly than at Stratford. But tradi- 



56 



MEMOIRS OF 



tion assigns a particular occasion and other motive 
for his leaving home. Betterton heard, and Rowe 
tells us, that he fell into bad company, and that 
some of his wild companions, who made a frequent 
practice of deer-stealing, drew him into the rob- 
bery of a park belonging to Sir Thomas Lucy, of 
Charlecote. For this, according to Rowe's story, 
he was prosecuted by the knight, and in revenge 
lampooned him in a ballad so bitter that the pros- 
ecution became a persecution of such severity that 
he was obliged to flee the country, and shelter him- 
self in London. There is what may perhaps be ac- 
cepted as independent authority for the existence 
of this tradition. The Reverend William Ful- 
man, an antiquary, who died in 1688, bequeathed 
his manuscript biographical memorandums to 
the Reverend Richard Davies, Rector of Sapper- 
ton in Gloucestershire, and Archdeacon of Lich- 
field, who died in 1708. To a note of Fulman's, 
which barely records Shakespeare's birth, death, 
and occupation, Davies made brief additions, the 
principal of which is, that William Shakespeare 
was "much given to all unluckinesse in stealing 
venison and rabbits, particularly from S'' Lu- 
cy, who had him oft whipt and sometimes impris- 
oned, and at last made him fly his native country, 
to his great advancement : but his revenge was so 
great that he is his Justice Clodpate, and calls him 
a great man, and that in allusion to his name bore 
three louses rampant for his arms." Davies may 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



57 



have heard this story in Stratford ; but consider- 
ing the date of his death, 1708, and that of Bet- 
terton's visit to Warwickshire, 1675, and Rowe's 
pubhcation of his edition of Shakespeare's Works, 
1709, it is not at all improbable, to say the least, 
that the story had reached the Archdeacon di- 
rectly or indirectly through the actor.* But Ca- 
pell tells us that a Mr. Thomas Jones, who lived 
at Tarbick, a few miles from Stratford, and who 
died there in 1703, more than ninety years of age, 
remembered having heard from old people at Strat- 
ford the story of Shakespeare's robbing Sir Thom- 
as Lucy's park.f According to Mr. Jones their 
story agreed with that told by Rowe, with this ad- 
dition, — that the lampoon was stuck upon the 
park gate, and that this insult, added to the injury 
of the deer-stealing, provoked the prosecution. 
Mr. Jones had written down the first stanza of 

* Betterton was born in 1635, and went upon the stage in 1656 
or 1657. The veneration for Shakespeare with which he was im- 
bued by the study of his plays was the motive of his pilgrimage 
to Stratford. We may be quite sure that the journey was under- 
taken after 1670, for in that year Shakespeare's granddaughter, 
who must have known much that Betterton did not discover, died 
in Shakespeare's house ; and it could hardly have been after 
1675, for at that time the great actor was grievously afflicted with 
a disease, — the gout, — which compelled him to retire from the 
stage, and from which he suffered until it caused his death, in 
1 7 ID. Betterton had been taught to play some of Shakespeare's 
principal characters by Sir William Davenant, who had seen them 
performed by actors of the Black-friars Theatre, who had been in- 
structed by the poet himself See Downes's Roscins Anglicamu. 

*■ Azotes and Various Readings, &c., Vol. 11. p. 75. 



58 



MEMOIRS OF 



this ballad, and it reached Capell through his own 
grandfather, a contemporary of Jones. A similar 
account of a very old man living near Stratford, 
and remembering the deer-stealing story and the 
ballad, is given by Oldys, the antiquarian, in his 
manuscript notes. Oldys and Capell plainly de- 
rived their information from the same source, 
though possibly through different channels ; and 
the stanza of the ballad is given by both of them 
in the same words, with the exception of a single 
syllable. These are the lines according to Oldys, 
with the addition of " O " in the last line, which 
appears in Capell's copy, and which plainly be- 
longs there : — 

" A parliemente member, a justice of peace, 
At home a poor scare-crowe, at London an asse. 
If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it, 
Then Lucy is lowsie whatever befall it : * 

He thinks himself greate. 

Yet an asse in his state 
We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate. 
If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it, 
Sing O lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it." 

The phrase " Parliament member," if we must 
accept it as having been originally written in the 
first line of this lampoon, is inconsistent with its 
genuineness ; for in Shakespeare's time, and long 
after, the phrase was Parliament man. But as the 
verses were handed down orally, a conformity to 
the more recent custom in this respect would 
creep in easily and unnoticed. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. ^g 

This story enriches with a rare touch of real 
life our faint and meagre memorials of Shake- 
speare. Not sufficiently well established to be 
beyond the assaults of those who think it scorn 
that the author of Km£- Lear and Hamlet should 
have stolen deer and written coarse lampoons, it 
yet may well be cherished, and its credibility 
maintained, by those who prize a trait of character 
and a glimpse of personal experience above all 
question of propriety. In Queen Bess's time deer- 
stealing did not rank with sheep-stealing ; and he 
who wrote, and was praised for writing, The Com- 
edy of Errors and Troilus and Cressida when he 
was a man, may well be believed, without any 
abatem.ent of his dignity, to have written the Lucy 
ballad in his boyhood. Malone thought that he 
had exploded the tradition by showing that Sir 
Thomas Lucy had no park, and therefore could 
have no deer to be stolen ; and the lampoon has 
been set aside as a fabrication by some writers, 
and regarded by all with suspicion. But it appears 
that, whether the knight had an enclosure with for- 
mal park privileges or not, the family certainly had 
deer on their estate, which fulfils the only condition 
requisite for the truth of the story in that regard ; 
for Sir Thomas Lucy, son of Shakespeare's victim, 
sent a buck as a present to Harehill when Sir 
Thomas Egerton entertained Queen Elizabeth 
there in August, 1602.* I think that there is a 

* Egerton Papers, pp. 350, 355. 



5o MEMOIRS OF 

solution to the question somewhat different from 
any that has yet been brought forward, and much 
more probable. 

The first scene of The Merry Wives of Wind- 
sor certainly gives strong support to the tradition ; 
so strong, in fact, that it has been supposed, with 
some reason, to have been its origin. In that 
scene Shakespeare makes Justice Shallow (who, 
in the words of Davies, is his clodpate, or, as we 
should say, his clownish or loutish, justice) bear a 
dozen white luces, or pikes, in his coat of arms, 
which bearing gives the Welsh parson the oppor- 
tunity for his punning jest that "the dozen white 
louses do become an old coat well." * The Lucys 
bore punning coat-armor, three luces, hariant ; 
and the allusion is unmistakable. In that scene, 
too, the country gentleman who is so proud of the 
luces in his old coat bursts upon the stage furious 
at Falstaff for having killed his deer. Now, in 
Shakespeare's day, as well as long before, killing a 
gentleman's deer was almost as common among 
wild young men as robbing a farmer's orchard 

* Some critics have attrilDuted the transformation of luces to 
louses to Sir Hugh's incapacity of English speech ; but this is to 
rob the Welshman of his wit. The pronunciation of tc as ow is no 
trick of a Welsh tongue, or of any other, I believe ; but " louse " 
was pronounced like " luce " or " loose " by many people. So the 
ballad tells us that "lousy is Lucy as some volke miscall it." 
There is a similar variation as to the name Toucey, which some 
pronounce Toosey, giving the first syllable the vowel sound of too 
undjfozi, others Towsey, with the sound oi how^ thou. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. ^j 

among boys. Indeed, it was looked upon as a 
sign of that poor semblance of manliness some- 
times called spirit, and was rather a gentleman's 
misdemeanor than a yeoman's ; one which a peas- 
ant would not have presumed to commit, except, 
indeed, at risk of his ears, for poaching at once 
upon the game- and the sin-preserves of his bet- 
ters. Noblemen engaged in it ; and in days gone 
by the very first Prince of Wales had been a deer- 
stealer. Among multitudinous passages illustra- 
tive of this trait of manners, a story preserved by 
Wood in his AtheiKB Oxonienses fixes unmistak- 
ably the grade of the ofience. It is there told, on 
the authority of Simon Forman, that his patrons, 
Robert Pinkney and John Thornborough, the lat- 
ter of whom was admitted a member of Magdalen 
College in 1570, and became Bishop of Bristol and 
Worcester, " seldom studied or gave themselves to 
their books, but spent their time in fencing-schools 
and dancing-schools, in stealing deer and conies, 
in hunting the hare and wooing girls." * In fact, 
deer-stealing then supplied to the young members 
of the privileged classes in Old England an excite- 
ment of a higher kind than that afibrded by beat- 
ing watchmen and tearing off knockers and bell- 
pulls to the generation but just passed away. A 
passage of TitiLS Andronicus, written soon after 
Shakespeare reached London, is here in point. 
Prince Demetrius exclaims : — 

* Vol. I. p. 371. 



52 MEMOIRS OF 

" What, hast thou not full often struck a doe, 
And cleanly borne her past the keeper's nose ? " 

Whereupon Steevens, wishing to discredit the 
play as Shakespeare's, remarks: "We have here 
Demetrius, the son of a queen, demanding of his 
brother if he has not often been reduced to prac- 
tise the common artifices of a deer-stealer, — an 
absurdity worthy the rest of the piece." Probably 
Steevens had never read in the old chronicle of 
Edward of Caernarvon, the first Prince of Wales, 
that " King Edward put his son. Prince Edward, 
in prison because he had riotously broken into the 
park of Walter Langton, Bishop of Chester, and 
stolen his deer." The Prince did this at the insti- 
gation of his favorite, that handsome, insolent rake. 
Piers de Gaveston ; and he had previously begged 
Hugh le Despencer to pardon his "well-beloved 
John de Bonynge," who had in like manner broken 
into that nobleman's park. What was pastime 
for a Prince of Wales and his companions in the 
fourteenth century, might well be regarded as a 
venial misdemeanor on the part of a landless 
knight, and a mark of spirit in a yeoman's son, in 
the sixteenth. 

But he with the "three louses rampant" on 
his coat makes much more than this of Fal- 
staff's affair. He will bring it before the Coun- 
cil, he will make a Star-Chamber matter of it, and 
pronounces it a riot. And, in fact, according to 
his account, Sir John was not content with steal- 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



63 



ing his deer, but broke open his lodge and beat 
his men. It seems then, that, in writing this pas- 
sage, Shakespeare had in mind not only an actual 
occurrence in which Sir Thomas Lucy was con- 
cerned, but one of greater gravity than a mere 
deer-stealing affair ; that having been made the 
occasion of more serious outrage. 

Now, Sir Thomas Lucy was a man of much 
consideration in Warwickshire, where he had 
come to a fine estate in 155 1, at only nineteen 
years of age. He was a member of Parliament 
twice; first in 1571, and next from November, 
1584, to March of the following year; just before 
the very time when, according to all indications, 
Shakespeare left Stratford. Sir Thomas was a 
somewhat prominent member of the Puritanical 
party, as appears by what is known of his Parlia- 
mentary course. For instance, during his first 
term he was one of a committee appointed upon 
"defections" in religious matters, one object of 
the movers of which was " to purge the Common 
Prayer Book, and free it from certain superstitious 
ceremonies, as using the sign of the cross in bap- 
tism," &c. He was, on the other hand, active in 
the enforcement and preservation of the game 
privileges of the nobility and gentry, and served 
on a committee to which a bill for this purpose 
was referred, of which he appears to have been 
chairman. This took place in his last term, 1584 
to 1585, — the time of his alleged persecution of 



64 



MEMOIRS OF 



William Shakespeare for poaching. Charlecote, 
his seat, being only three miles from Stratford, 
and he being a man of such weight and position 
in the county, he would naturally have somewhat 
close public relations with the towns-people and 
their authorities. That such was the case, the 
records of the town and of the county furnish 
ample evidence. Whenever there was a com- 
mission appointed in relation to affairs in that 
neighborhood, he was sure to be on it ; and the 
Chamberlain's accounts, as set forth by Mr. Halli- 
well, show expenses at divers times to provide 
Sir Thomas with sack and sugar, to expedite or 
smooth his intercourse with the corporation. But 
in spite of mollifying drinks, the relations of the 
Lucy family with the Stratford folk were not 
always amicable. Mr. Halliwell's investigations 
have shown that the Lucys were not unfrequently 
engaged in disputes with the corporation of that 
town. Records of one about common of pasture 
in Henry VIII.'s time are still preserved in the 
Chapter House at London ; and among the pa- 
pers at the Rolls' House is one containing "the 
names of them that made the ryot uppon Mas- 
ter Thomas Lucy, esquier." 

Here are all the conditions of a very pretty 
parish quarrel. A puritanical knight, fussy about 
his family pretensions and his game, having he- 
reditary disagreement with the Stratford people 
about rights of common, — a subject on which 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



65 



they were, like all of English race, sure to be 
tenacious, — after having been left out of Par- 
liament for eleven years, is re-elected, and imme- 
diately sets to work at securing that privilege so 
dearly prized by his class, and so odious to all 
below it, — the preservation of game for the pas- 
time of the gentry. The anti-puritan party and 
those who stand up stoutly for rights of common 
vent their indignation to the best of their ability ; 
one of their number writes a lampoon upon him, 
and a body of them, too strong to be successfully 
withstood, break riotously into his grounds, kill 
his deer, beat his men, and carry off their booty 
in triumph. The affair is an outbreak of rude 
parish politics, a popular demonstration against 
an unpopular man ; and who so likely to take 
part in it as the son of the former high bailiff, 
who, we know, was no puritan, and whose father, 
ambitious, and, as we shall see, even pretending 
to a coat of arms, had most probably had per- 
sonal and official disagreements with, and received 
personal slights and rebuffs from, his rich, power- 
ful, arrogant neighbor, — or who so likely to write 
the lampoon as young Will Shakespeare.-' There 
could hardly have been two in Stratford who 
were able to write that stanza, the rhythm of 
which shows no common clodpole's ear, and 
which, though coarse in its satire, is bitter and 
well suited to the occasion. That it is a genu- 
ine production, — that is, part of a ballad written 



55 MEMOIRS OF 

at the time for the purpose of lampooning Sir 
Thomas Lucy, — I think there can be no doubt : 
it carries its genuineness upon its face and in its 
spirit. That Shakespeare wrote it, I am incUned 
to beheve. But even were he not its author, if 
he had taken any part in a demonstration against 
Sir Thomas Lucy, and soon after was driven, by 
whatever circumstances, to leave Stratford for Lon- 
don, where he rose to distinction as a poet, rumor 
would be likely soon to attribute the ballad to him, 
and to assign the occasion on which it was writ- 
ten as that which caused his departure ; and ru- 
mor would soon become tradition.* That Shake- 
speare meant to pay off a Stratford debt to Sir 
Thomas Lucy in that first scene of The Merry 
Wives, and that he did it with the memory of the 
riotous trespass upon that gentleman's grounds, 
seem equally manifest. That he had taken part 
in the event which he commemorated, there is 

* The stanza given above is plainly one, and not the first, of 
several. Others have been brought forward as the remainder 
of the lampoon ; but they are too plainly spurious to be worthy 
of notice. The story of the deer-stealing is said by Mr. Fullom, 
in his History of William Shakespeare, to be confirmed by a 
note, entered, about 1750, in a manuscript pedigree of the Lucy 
family, by an old man named Ward, who derived his informa- 
tion from family papers then in his hands. But this date is 
nearly fifty years after the publication of the story in Rowe's 
Life, and so is of little or no value. According to the same 
authority Sir Thomas Lucy ceased his prosecution of Shake- 
speare, and released him, at the intercession of the Earl of 
Leicester. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



67 



not evidence which would be sufficient in a court 
of law, but quite enough for those who are satis- 
fied with the concurrence of probability and 
tradition ; and I confess that I am of that num- 
ber. 

From 1584, when Shakespeare's twin chil- 
dren — Hamnet and Judith — were baptized, until 
1592, when we know that he was rising rapidly to 
distinction as a playwright in London, no record 
of his life has been discovered ; nor has tradition 
contributed anything of importance to fill the 
gap, except the story of the deer-stealing and its 
consequences. What was he doing in all those 
eight years ? and what before the former date } 
For he was not born to wealth and privilege, and 
so could tiot, like the future Bishop of Bristol and 
Worcester, spend all his time in stealing deer 
and wooing girls. Malone, noticing the frequen- 
cy with which he uses law terms, conjectured that 
he had passed some of his adolescent years in an 
attorney's office. In support of his conjecture, 
Malone, himself a barrister, cited twenty -four 
passages distinguished by the presence of law 
phrases ; and to these he might have added many 
more. But the use of such phrases is by no 
means peculiar to Shakespeare. The writings of 
the poets and playwrights of this period, Spen- 
ser, Drayton, Greene, Beaumont and Fletcher, 
Middleton, Donne, and many others of less note, 



58 MEMOIRS OF 

are thickly sprinkled with them.* In fact, the 
application of legal language to the ordinary af- 
fairs of life was more common two hundred and 
fifty years ago than it is now ; though even now- 
a-days the usage is much more general in the 

* There are two passages in Shakespeare's works which are 
so remarkable for the freedom with which law phrases are scat- 
tered through them, that it is worth while to give them here. 
The first is the well-known speech in the grave-digging scene of 
Hmnlet: — 

" Hamlet. — There 's another. Why may not that be the skull 
of a lawyer ? Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases^ 
his tenures, and his tricks ? Why does he suffer this rude knave, 
now, to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will 
not tell him of his action of battery? Humph! This fellow 
might be in 's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his 
recognizances, his fines, his double vauchers, his recoveries. Is this 
the fijte of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have 
his fine pate full of fine dirt ? Will his vouchers vouch him no 
more of his purchases, and double ones, too, than the length and 
breadth of a pair of htdenttcres ? The very conveyances of his 
lands will hardly lie in this b6x ; and must the ittheritor himself 
have no more ? ha ? " — Act V. So. I. 

The second is the following Sonnet (No. XLVI.), not only the 
language, but the very fundamental conceit of which, it will be 
seen, is purely legal : — 

" Mine Eye and Heart are at a mortal war 
How to divide the conquest of thy sight ; 
Mine Eye my Heart thy picture's sight would bar. 
My Heart mine Eye the freedom of that right. 
My Heart doth//m^ that thou in him dost lie 
(A closet never pierc'd with crystal eyes) ; 
But the defiendajit doth that plea deny, 
And says in him thy fair appearance lies. 
To 'cide this title is impanelled 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



69 



rural districts than persons who have not hved in 
them would suppose. There law shares with ag- 
riculture the function of providing those phrases 
of common conversation which, used figuratively 
at first, and often with poetic feeling, soon pass 
into mere thought-saving formulas of speech, and 

A qiiest of thoughts, all tenants to the Heart, 
And by their verdict is determined 
The clear Eye's moiety, and the dear Heart's part ; 
As thus : Mine Eye's due is thine outward part, 
And my Heart's right, thine inward love of heart." 

It would seem, indeed, as if passages like these must be re- 
ceived as evidence that Shakespeare had more familiarity with 
legal phraseology, if not a greater knowledge of it, than could 
have been acquired except by habitual use in the course of pro- 
fessional occupation. But that he is not peculiar even in this 
crowding of many law-terms into one brief passage, take this 
evidence from The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, a poor play 
written by George Wilkins, an obscure contemporary play- 
wright : — 

" Doctor. Now, Sir, from this your oath and bond, 
Faith's pledge and seal of conscience, you have run, 
Broken all contracts, and the forfeiture 
Justice hath now in s^lit against your soul : 
Angels are made \}i\Q jurors, who are "witnesses 
Unto the oath you took ; and God himself. 
Maker of marriage, He that hath sealed the deed 
As a firm lease unto you during life, 
Sits now as Judge of your transgression : 
The world inforjns against you with this voice, — 
If such sins reign, what mortals can rejoice t 

" Scarborow. What then ensues to me ? 

" Doctor. A heavy doom, whose execution ''s 
Now served upon your conscience," &c. 

D. O. P., Vol. III. p. 91, ed. 1825. 



«Q MEMOIRS OF 

which in large cities are mostly drawn from trade 
and politics * 

There are reasons, however, for believing that 
Shakespeare had more than a layman's knowledge 
of the technical language of the law. The famili- 
arity with that language manifested by other play- 
wrights and poets of his day precludes us, indeed, 
from accepting the mere occurrence of law phrases 
in his works as indications of a distinctive profes- 
sional training. On the other hand, we have direct 
contemporary evidence that many dramatic au- 
thors of the Elizabethan period (1575 - 1625) were 
bred attorneys or barristers. Thomas Nash, a 
playwright, poet, and novelist, whose works were in 
vogue just before Shakespeare wrote, in an " Epis- 

* And yet Lord Chief Justice Campbell could cite these lines 
from the exquisite song in Measure for Measure as among the evi- 
dences of Shakespeare's legal acquirements : — 

" But my kisses bring again 
Seals of love, but sealed in vain." 

If Shakespeare's lines smell of law, hov^ strong is the odor of 
parchment and red tape in these, from Drayton's Fourth Eclogue 
(1605)! — 

" Kindnesse againe with kindnesse was repay'd, 

And with sweet kisses couenants were sealed.'''' 

Surely a man must be both a Lord Chancellor and a Shakespea- 
rian commentator to forget that the use of seals is as old as the 
art of writing, and perhaps older, and that the practice has fur- 
nished a figure of speech to poets from the time when it was 
written, that out of the whirlwind Job heard, " It is turned as clay 
to the seal,''' and probably from a period yet more remote. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



71 



tie to the Gentleman Students of the Two Uni- 
versities," with which, according to the fashion of 
the time, he introduced Greene's Menaphon (1587) 
to the reader, has the following paragraph : — 

" It is a common practice, now-a-days, amongst a sort of 
shifting companions that run through every art and thrive 
by none, to leave the trade of Noverint, whereto they were 
born, and busy themselves with the endeavors of art, that 
could scarcely Latinize their neck-verse, if they should 
have need ; yet EngHsh Seneca, read by candle-light, 
yields many good sentences, as, Blood is a beggar^ &c. ; 
and if you intreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will af- 
ford you whole Hamlets, — I should say, handfuls of tragi- 
cal speeches. But, oh, grief! Tempiis edax rerum, — 
what is that will last always ? The sea, exhaled by drops, 
will, in continuance, be dry ; and Seneca, let blood line by 
line and page by page, at length must needs die to our 
stage." 

It has most unaccountably been assumed that 
this passage refers to Shakespeare, chiefly, it 
would seem, if not only, because of the phrase, 
" whole Hamlets, — I should say, handfuls of tragi- 
cal speeches," — which has been looked upon as 
an allusion to Shakespeare's great tragedy. That 
Shakespeare had written this tragedy in 1586, 
when he was but twenty-two years old, is improb- 
able to the verge of impossibility ; and Nash's 
allusion, if indeed he meant a punning sneer at a 
play, (which is not certain,) was doubtless to an 
old, lost dramatic version of the Danish story 
upon which Shakespeare built his Hamlet. But 
on the contrary, it seems clear that Nash's object 



72 MEMOIRS OF 

was to sneer at Jasper Heywood, Alexander 
Nevil, John Studley, Thomas Nuce, and Thomas 
Newton, — one or more of them, — whose Seneca^ 
his Tenne Tragedies translated into Englysh, was 
pubhshed in 158 1. It is a very grievous perform- 
ance ; and Shakespeare, who had read it thor- 
oughly, made sport of it in A Midsimimer Nighfs 
Dream. Indeed, Nash introduces the passage 
above given by this paragraph, which has been 
hitherto omitted in noticing the subject: "I will 
turn my back to my first text of studies of delight, 
and talk a little in friendship with a few of our 
trivial translators." 

Upon the leaving of law* for dramatic litera- 
ture the passage in question is plainly of general 
application. Such a change of occupation Nash 
says was common ; and his testimony accords 
with all that we know of the social and literary 
history of that age. There was no regular army 
in Elizabeth's time ; and the younger sons of gen- 
tlemen not rich and of well-to-do yeomen flocked 
to the church and to the bar ; and as the former 
had ceased to be a stepping-stone to power and 
wealth while the latter was gaining in that regard, 
most of these young men became attorneys or 
barristers. But then, as now, the early years of 
professional life were seasons of sharp trial and 

* Attorneys were called noverints because of the phrase JVove- 
rint universi per presentes (Know all men by these presents) with 
which many legal instruments then began. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



73 



bitter disappointment. Necessity pressed sorely, 
or pleasure wooed resistlessly ; and the slender 
purse wasted rapidly away while the young lawyer 
awaited the employment that did not come. He 
knew then, as now he knows, the heart sickness 
that waits on hope deferred ; nay, he felt, as now 
he sometimes feels, the tooth of hunger gnawing 
through the principles and firm resolves that par- 
tition a life of honor and self-respect from one 
darkened by conscious loss of rectitude, if not by 
•open shame. Happy (yet, it may be, O un- 
happy) he who now in such a strait can wield the 
pen of a ready writer ! For the press, perchance, 
may afford him a support which, though tempo- 
rary and precarious, will hold him up until he can 
stand upon more stable ground. But in the reigns 
of Good Queen Bess and Gentle Jamie there was 
no press. There was, however, an incessant de- 
mand for new plays. Play-going was the chief 
intellectual recreation of that day for all classes, 
high and low. It is not extravagant to say that 
there were then more new plays produced in 
London in one month, than there are now in 
both Great Britain and the United States in a 
whole year. 

To play -writing, therefore, the needy and gifted 
young lawyer turned his hand at that day, as he 
does now to journalism; and of those who had 
been successful in their dramatic efforts, how inev- 
itable it was that many would give themselves up 
4 



yA MEMOIRS OF 

to play-writing, and that thus the language of the 
plays of that time should show such a remarkable 
infusion of law phrases ! To what, then, must we 
attribute the fact, that of all the plays that have 
survived of those written between 1580 and 1620 
Shakespeare's are most noteworthy in this respect ? 
For no dramatist of the time, not even Beaumont, 
who was a younger son of a Judge of the Com- 
mon Pleas, and who, after studying in the Inns of 
Court, abandoned law for the drama, used legal 
phrases with Shakespeare's readiness and exact- 
ness. And the significance of this fact is height- 
ened by another, — that it is only to the language 
of the law that he exhibits this inclination. The 
phrases peculiar to other occupations serve him 
on rare occasions by way of description, compar- 
ison, or illustration, generally when something in 
the scene suggests them ; but legal phrases flow 
from his pen as part of his vocabulary and parcel 
of his thought. The word "purchase," for in- 
stance, which in ordinary use meant, as now it 
means, to acquire by giving value, applies in law 
to all legal modes of obtaining property, except 
inheritance or descent. And in this peculiar sense 
the word occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty- 
four plays, but only in a single passage in the fifty- 
four plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. And in the 
first scene of the Midsummer Night's Dream the 
father of Hermia begs the ancient privilege of 
Athens, that he may dispose of his daughter either 
to Demetrius or to death, — 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 

" according to our law 
Immediately provided in that case." 



75 



He pleads the statute ; and the words run off his 
tongue in heroic verse as if he were reading them 
from a paper. 

As the courts of law in Shakespeare's time oc- 
cupied public attention much more than they do 
now, — their terms having regulated " the season " 
of London society,* — it has been suggested that it 
was in attendance upon them that he picked up 
his legal vocabulary. But this supposition not 
only fails to account for Shakespeare's peculiar 
freedom and exactness in the use of that phrase- 
ology, — it does not even place him in the way of 
learning those terms his use of which is most re- 
markable ; which are not such as he would have 
heard at ordinary proceedings at nisi prius, but 
such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real prop- 
erty, — " fine and recovery," " statutes merchant," 
"purchase," "indenture," "tenure," " double vouch- 
er," " fee simple," " fee farm," " remainder," " rever- 
sion," "forfeiture," &c. This conveyancer's jargon 
could not have been picked up by hanging round 
the courts of law in London two hundred and fifty 
years ago, when suits as to the title to real prop- 
erty were comparatively so rare. And beside, 
Shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his early 
plays, written in his first London years, as in those 

* Faltsaff, for instance, speaks of " the wearing out of six fash- 
ions, which is four tei^ms or two actions." 



^5 MEMOIRS OF 

produced at a later period * Just as exactly 
too ; for the correctness and propriety with which 
these terms are introduced have compelled the ad- 
miration of a Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor.! 
Again, bearing in mind that genius, although it 
reveals general truth, and facilitates all acquire- 
ment, does not impart facts or acquaintance with 
technical terms, how can we account for the fact 
that, in an age when it was the common practice 
for young lawyers to write plays, one playwright 
left upon his plays a stronger, sharper legal stamp 
than appears upon those of any of his contempo- 
raries, and that the characters of this stamp are 
those of the complicated law of real property? 

* Thus, in Henry the Sixth, Part II., Jack Cade says, " Men shall 
hold of me in capite : and we charge and command that wives be 
as free as heart can wish or tongiie can telV ; — words which indi- 
cate acquaintance with very ancient and uncommon tenures of 
land. In the Comedy of Errors, when Dromio of Syracuse says, 
" There 's no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald 
by nature," (wise words, and fatal to many hopes,) his mas- 
ter replies, " May he not do it hjfjie and recovery ? " Fine and 
recovery was a process by which, through a fictitious suit, a trans- 
fer was made of the title in an entailed estate. In Lovers Labor 'j 
Lost, almost without a doubt the first comedy that Shakespeare 
wrote, on Boyet's offering to kiss Maria (Act 11. Sc. i), she de- 
clines the salute, and says, *' My lips are no common, though sev- 
eral they be." Maria's allusion is plainly to tenancy in common 
by several (i. e. divided, distinct) title. 

t These are Lord Campbell's words : " While novelists and 
dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the law of mar- 
riage, of wills, and of inheritance, to Shakespeare's law, lavishly 
as he propounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of ex- 
ceptions, nor writ of error." 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



77 



Must we believe that this man was thus distin- 
guished among a crowd of play-writing lawyers, 
not only by his genius, but by a lack of special 
knowledge of the law ? Or shall we rather be- 
lieve that the son of the late high bailiff of Strat- 
ford, a somewhat clever lad, and ambitious withal, 
was allowed to commence his studies for a profes- 
sion for which his cleverness fitted him, and by 
which he might reasonably hope to rise at least to 
moderate wealth and distinction, and that he con- 
tinued these studies until his father's misfortunes, 
aided perhaps by some of those acts of youthful 
indiscretion which clever lads as well as dull ones 
sometimes will commit, threw him upon his own re- 
sources, — and that then, law failing to supply his 
pressing need, he turned to the stage, on which he 
had townsmen and friends ? One of these con- 
clusions is in the face of reason, fact, and proba- 
bility ; the other in accordance with them all. 

But the bare fact that Shakespeare was an at- 
torney's clerk, even if indisputably established, 
though of some interest, is of little real impor- 
tance. It teaches us nothing about the man, of 
what he did for himself, thought for himself, how 
he joyed, how he suffered, what he was in his mere 
manhood. It has but a naked material relation to 
the other fact, that he uses legal phrases oftener, 
more freely, and more exactly than any other 
poet. 



78 



MEMOIRS OF 



III. 



Somewhere, then, within the years 1585 and 
1586, Shakespeare went from Stratford to Lon- 
don, where we next hear of him as an actor and a 
mender of old plays. That he went with the in- 
tention of becoming an actor, has been universally 
assumed ; but perhaps too hastily. For he had 
social ambition and high self-esteem ; and in his 
day to become an actor was to cast the one of these 
sentiments aside, and to tread the other under 
foot. Betterton's story, told through Rowe, is, that 
Shakespeare was " obliged to leave his business 
and family for some time, and shelter himself in 
London." In so far as this may be relied upon, it 
shows that Shakespeare had business in Stratford, 
and that he sought only a temporary refuge in the 
metropolis. Probably it was with no very definite 
purpose that he left his native place. Poverty, 
persecution, and perhaps a third Fury, made Strat- 
ford too hot to hold him ; and he might well flee, 
vaguely seeking relief for the present and provis- 
ion for the future. He would naturally hope to 
live in London by the business which he had fol- 
lowed at Stratford. Such is the way of ambitious 
young men who go from rural districts to a me- 
tropolis. And, until every other means of liveli- 
hood had failed him, it was not in this high-mind- 
ed, sensitive, aspiring youth to assume voluntarily 
a profession then scorned of all men. We may 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



79 



be sure that, if he sought business as an attorney 
in London, he did not at once obtain it. Shake- 
speare although he was, no such miracle could be 
wrought for him ; nay, the less would it be wrought 
because of his being Shakespeare. He doubtless 
in these first days hoped for a publisher ; and not 
improbably this purpose was among those which 
led him up to London. Let who will believe that 
he went that journey without a manuscript in his 
pocket. For to suppose that a man of poetic 
power lives until his twenty-first year without 
writing a poem, which he then rates higher 
than he ever afterward will rate any of his work, 
is to set aside the history of poetry, and to si- 
lence those years which are most affluent of 
fancy and most eager for expression. 

With Venus and Adonis written, if nothing 
else, — but I think it not unlikely a play, — 
Shakespeare went to London and sought a pa- 
tron. For in those days a poet needed a patron 
even more than a publisher ; as without the for- 
mer he rarely or never got the latter. Shake- 
speare found a patron ; but not so soon, we may 
be sure, as he had expected. Meantime, while he 
waited, the stage door stood ajar invitingly, and 
he was both tempted and impelled to enter. For 
that natural inclination to poetry and acting 
which Aubrey tells us he possessed had been 
stimulated by the frequent visits of companies of 
players to Stratford, at whose performances he 



8o 



MEMOIRS OF 



could not have failed to be a delighted and 
thoughtful spectator. Indeed, as it was the cus- 
tom for the mayor or bailiff of a town visited by 
a travelling company to bespeak the play at their 
first exhibition, to reward them for it himself, and 
to admit the audience gratis, it may safely be as- 
sumed that the first theatrical performance in 
Stratford of which there is any record had John 
Shakespeare for its patron. For it was given in 
1569, the year in which he was high bailiff; and 
the bailiff's son, although he was then only five 
years old, we may be sure was present. Between 
1569 and 1586 hardly a year passed without sev- 
eral performances by one or more companies at 
Stratford. But natural inclination and straitened 
means of living were not the only influences 
which led Shakespeare to the theatre. Other 
Stratford boys had gone up to London, and some 
of them had become players. Thomas Greene, 
one of the most eminent actors of the Elizabethan 
period, he who gave his name to The City Gallant, 
which was known and published as " Greene's 
Tu Qiioquel' was in 1586 a member of the compa- 
ny known as " The Lord Chamberlain's Servants," 
to which Shakespeare became permanently at- 
tached. Greene was of a respectable family at 
Stratford, one member of which was an attorney, 
who had professional connections in London, 
and was Shakespeare's kinsman. Burbadge, Sly, 
Heminge, and Pope, who all bore Warwickshire 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 3 1 

names, were on the London stage at the time 
of Shakespeare's arrival at the metropoHs.* If 
Shakespeare went to London relying upon the 
good offices of friends, we may be sure that he 
looked more to his townsman, Greene the attor- 
ney, than to his other townsman, Greene the 
actor. But in that case, considering how shy 
attorneys are apt to be of the sort of young man 
who steals deer and writes verses, it is not at all 
surprising that the player proved to be the more 
serviceable acquaintance. 

Many circumstances combine to show that it 
was in 1586 that William Shakespeare became 
connected with the London stage ; a few month's 
variation — and there cannot be more — in the 
date, one way or the other, is of small impor- 
tance. Betterton heard that "he was received 
into the company at first in a very mean rank," 
and the octogenarian parish clerk of Stratford, 
before mentioned, told Dowdall, in 1693, that he 
"was received into the play-house as a serviture." 
These stories have an air of truth. What claim 
had this raw Stratford stripling to put his foot 
higher than the first round of the ladder.'^ In 
those days that round was apprenticeship to some 
well-established actor ; and as such a servitor 
probability and tradition unite in assuring us that 

* See the Remarks on the Preliminary Matter to the Folio, 
Vol. II. pp. xxxvi., xlvii., xlviii. of the author's edition of Shake- 
speare's Works. 

4* F 



32 MEMOIRS OF 

William Shakespeare began his theatrical career. 
There is a story that his first occupation in Lon- 
don was holding horses at the play-house door ; 
but it was not heard of until the middle of the 
last century, and is unworthy of serious attention. 

Theatres had increased rapidly in London dur- 
ing the few years preceding Shakespeare's arrival. 
Not long before that time public acting was con- 
fined almost entirely to the court-yards of large 
inns, or to temporary stages which were erected 
in the open air or in booths ; although sometimes 
the use of a large hall was obtained by the gener- 
osity of a nobleman or a corporation, or that of a 
churchyard, or even a church, by the paid conni- 
vance of the rector. The public authorities, more 
especially those who were inclined to Puritanism, 
exerted themselves in every possible way to re- 
press the performance of plays and interludes. 
They fined and imprisoned the players, even 
stocked them, and harassed and restrained them 
to the utmost of their ability. But, like all such 
restrictive, persecuting folk, they began their 
work at the wrong end to warrant any hope of 
its accomplishment. They punished the players 
when they should have disciplined the public. 
Had they been able to root out the taste for dra- 
matic entertainment, and checked the demand for 
it, they might have let the poor players go quietly 
on with their performances, sure that they would 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



83 



soon come to an end. But the taste grew into 
a fierce appetite, and pervaded all classes of so- 
ciety ; and the supply of the needful food was an 
inevitable necessity. The strait-laced aldermen 
of London would neither be mollified by the art 
of the player nor learn sufficient wisdom from 
experience to devote their energies to regulating 
that which they could not stop ; and in 1575 the 
players were interdicted from the practice of their 
art (or rather their calling, for it was not yet an 
art) within the limits of the city. 

Among the men who suffered from this new 
ordinance was James Burbadge, a Warwickshire 
man. He is said to have been a carpenter ; but 
he added to the gains of his craft what he could 
get as one of a cry of players ; and mayhap, like 
that other artisan actor, Nick Bottom, he had 
" simply the best wit of any handy-craft-man " in 
his city. Certainly whatever wit he had was put 
to good use ; for, as he could not play in London, 
he determined to play just outside of it, and to 
use his skill as a carpenter in building that then 
unheard-of thing in England, a play-house. Bor- 
rowing the good round sum of £600 from a rich 
father-in-law, he leased a plot of ground and the 
buildings upon it in the suburb of Shoreditch for 
twenty-one years, with the privilege of putting 
up a theatre ; and partly by altering, partly by 
building, as we have seen under similar circum- 
stances in New York, he soon had his play-house 



84 



MEMOIRS OF 



finished. And thus the oppression of an artisan 
player caused the erection, in 1575, of the First 
English Theatre, — indeed the first modern thea- 
tre ; for, setting aside the ruined structures of 
antiquity, in no other country at this time had 
there been built a house for the especial purpose 
of dramatic performances. Burbadge's house was 
called inevitably " The Theatre." It had no other 
name ; and no other was needed. The enterpris- 
ing dramatic carpenter's venture proved so prof- 
itable, that, resolving, like a Yankee showman of 
world-wide notoriety, to be his own opposition, 
he built within a year another theatre in Moor- 
fields, which he called " The Curtain " ; and to 
these two he added, in 1576, a third, destined to 
immortal fame. This was in the liberties of the 
late dissolved monastery of the Blackfriars. Like 
" The Theatre," it was constructed by the altera- 
tion of dwelling-houses. Its site is now in the 
heart of London, near Printing-House Square ; 
and even then, though outside the city proper, it 
was one of the most thickly-built quarters of the 
town, and one inhabited by the better sort of folk, 
and even by the nobility. These people, aided by 
the Mayor of London, did all they could to get the 
Privy Council to forbid the erection of the new 
theatre in their elegant and orderly neighborhood. 
But it is worthy of special notice that all this 
aristocratic and high official influence failed of 
the object to which it was directed. The love 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



85 



of the whole people for the drama was too strong 
and too vivid in its manifestation to make it 
politic, even in those days of arbitrary power, to 
restrict that individual liberty of which our race 
is so jealous, in favor of the few who were averse 
to stage plays or annoyed by the surroundings of 
a play-house. In 1586 the houses above named 
were the principal theatres of London ; but there 
were three or four other buildings, near the bank 
of the river, one of which was called " The Rose," 
which were used by players, tumblers, mounte- 
banks, and bear -baiters promiscuously. Paris 
Garden, which some time afterward became a 
theatre, was entirely devoted to the cruel sports 
of the baiting ring. 

These theatres were occupied by companies of 
players, each of which was under the patronage 
and protection of some distinguished nobleman. 
The most esteemed of these companies were the 
Queen's, the Earl of Leicester's, the Lord Admi- 
ral's (Earl of Nottingham), the Earl of Pem- 
broke's, the Earl of Sussex's, and the Children 
of the Royal Chapel and of St. Paul's. The 
company which played at the Blackfriars, and of 
which James Burbadge was the leading man, was 
the Earl of Leicester's. This company had played 
at Stratford several times in Shakespeare's boy- 
hood. The playwrights whose works were then 
most in vogue, and who were all attached to one 
or other of these companies, and were actors of 



36 MEMOIRS OF 

more or less repute, were George Peele, Robert 
Greene, Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, Thomas 
Kyd, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Lodge, Henry 
Chettle, and Anthony Munday. Of these only 
the first four possessed any marked superiority 
over their fellows ; and of the four only Marlowe's 
pen obtained for him any other place in the 
world's memory than that of having been a con- 
temporary of Shakespeare. 

Tradition and the custom of the time concur in 
assuring us that Shakespeare's first connection 
with the stage was as an actor ; and an actor he 
continued to be for twenty years or more. But 
although Aubrey tells us that " he did act exceed- 
ing well," he seems never to have risen high in 
this profession. Betterton, or perhaps Rowe, 
heard that the top of his performance was the 
Ghost in his own Hamlet ; and Oldys tells a story, 
that one of his younger brothers, who lived to a 
great age, being questioned as to William, said 
that he remembered having seen him act the part, 
in one of his own comedies, of a long-bearded, 
decrepit old man, who was supported by another 
person to a table, where they sat among other 
company, one of whom sang a song. If this were 
true, Shakespeare played Adam in As You Like 
It. And it is consistent with all that we know of 
him that he should play such parts as this and the 
Ghost, which required judgment and intelligent 
reading rather than passion and lively simulation. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



87 



It is not probable that Shakespeare, when he had 
found that he could labor profitably in a less pub- 
lic walk of his calling, ever strove for distinction 
or much employment as an actor. We know 
from one of his sonnets how bitter the conscious- 
ness of his position was to him, and that he 
cursed the fortune which had consigned him to 
a public life.* If he ever had comfort on the 
stage it must have been in playing kingly parts, 
which are assigned to him in the lines of Davies.f 
But although Shakespeare began his London 
life as a player, it was impossible that he should 
long remain without writing for the stage ; and so 
it happened. With what company he became 
first connected, there is no direct evidence ; but 
his earliest dramatic employment seems to have 
been as a co-worker with Greene, Marlowe, and 
Peele for the Earl of Pembroke's players. There 
are good reasons for believing that, in conjunction 
with one or more of these playwrights, he labored 
on TJie Fii'st Part of the Contention betwixt the 
Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, The 
True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, A Pleas- 
ant Conceited History of the Taming of a Shrew ^ 
Titus AndronicuSy an early form of Romeo and 
Juliet, of which there are some remains in the 
quarto edition of 1597, and probably some other 
pieces which have been lost.J It would have 

* Sonnet CXI. t See page 138. 

% See the Essay on the Authorship of King Henry the Sixth, 



38 MEMOIRS OF 

been strange, indeed almost unprecedented, if a 
young adventurer going up to London had imme- 
diately found his true place, and taken firm root 
therein. But little as we know of Shakespeare's 
period of trial and vicissitude, we do know that it 
was brief, and that within about three years from 
the time when he left his native place he attached 
himself to the Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon's com- 
pany (previously known as the Earl of Leicester's), 
of which the Burbadges, father and son, were 
prominent members, and that he became a share- 
holder in this company, and remained an active 
member of it until he finally retired to Stratford. 

Shakespeare immediately showed that unmis- 
takable trait of a man organized for success in 
life, which is so frequently lacking in men who 
are both gifted and industrious, — the ability to 
find his work, and to settle down quickly to it, 
and take hold of it in earnest. He worked hard, 
did everything that he could turn his hand to, — 
acted, wrote, helped others to write, — and seeing 
through men and things as he did at a glance, he 
was in those early years somewhat over-free of his 
criticism and his advice, and, what was less endur- 
able by his rivals, too ready to illustrate his prin- 
ciples of art successfully in practice. He came 
soon to be regarded, by those who liked and 

Vol. VII., and the Introduction to Tittis Androjziais, Vol. IX., 
The Taming of the Shrew, Vol. IV., and Romeo and yuliet^ 
Vol. X. of the author's edition of Shakespeare's Works. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



89 



needed him, as a most useful and excellent fel- 
low, a very factotum, and a man of great promise ; 
while those who disliked him and found him in 
their way, and whose ears were wounded by his 
praises, set him down as an officious and con- 
ceited upstart. He saw at once the coarse, un- 
natural, feeble, and inflated style of the men 
whom he found in possession of public favor, and 
he treated them to a little good-natured ridicule, 
of which we find traces in some of his plays, as in 
Hamlet and A Midsiivimei^-Nighi s Dream, and in 
some of his burlesque bombastic characters, as in 
Pistol and Nym. Now, men may love their ene- 
mies and do good to them that hate them; but 
men will never love their critics, or do anything 
but evil to them that ridicule them. As to criti- 
cism men are unwise ; but in regard to ridicule 
they have some reason. Accusation of crime is 
trifling in comparison. Say that a man has mur- 
dered his mother ; and if he has not done the 
deed, your slander will recoil upon your own head, 
bringing him consolation in your infamy. But 
make him ridiculous, and he simply is ridiculous, 
and there is an end ; except that he is your ene- 
my for life. Ridicule can neither be refuted nor 
explained away. For which reason, although it is 
a fair weapon against words and acts, (however 
poor a test of truth,) against persons it is the fit 
resort of cowardice and malice ; — a distinction, 
however, which many men cannot or will not 



QO MEMOIRS OF 

make ; and consequently an author often resents 
the ridicule of his writings as if it were directed 
against himself This was Shakespeare's experi- 
ence. But not content with criticism and carica- 
ture, he began to outstrip his victims in favor with 
the public. Now, such conduct is always resented 
as an insult. There is no surer, as there can be 
no sadder, evidence to a man that he is rising in 
the world's consideration, than an outcry from the 
little souls around him that he is receiving that of 
which he is not worthy. How they strive by pro- 
tests (always in the interests of truth), by sneers, 
and by all the little artifices of detraction, even 
silence, to show that he is as small as they are, 
only showing the while how much he is their 
superior ! Goodness divine and wisdom infinite 
could not escape such scoffing. " Is not this the 
carpenter's son ? is not his mother called Mary .? 
and his brethren James, and Joses, and Simon, 
and Judas, and his sisters, are they not all with 
us } Whence then hath this man all these 
things } And they were offended in him." 

That such was Shakespeare's lot we are not left 
to conjecture, hardly to infer. One of the play- 
wrights whom he found in high favor when he 
reached London, and with whom, as a youthful 
assistant, he began his dramatic labors, stretched 
out his hand from beyond the grave to leave a rec- 
ord of his hate for the man who had supplanted 
him, and who, he saw, would supplant his com- 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



91 



panions, as a writer for the stage. The drunken 
debauchee, Robert Greene, dying in dishonorable 
need, left behind him a pamphlet written on his 
death-bed, and published after his burial. It was 
called A Groatsworth of Wit boiLght with a Million 
of Repentance, and was better named than its au- 
thor, or its editor, Henry Chettle, probably sup- 
posed. But Greene, though repentant, with the 
repentance of sordid souls when they are cast 
down, was not so changed in heart that he could 
resist the temptation of discharging from his stif- 
fening hand a Parthian shaft, barbed with envy 
and malice, and winged with little wit, against 
young Shakespeare. In the pretended interests 
of truth and friendship, he warned his companions 
and co-workers, Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele, that 
the players who had all been beholden to them, 
as well as to him, would forsake them for a certain 
upstart crow, beautified with their feathers, who 
supposed that he was able to write blank verse 
with the best of them, and who, being in truth a 
Johannes Factotum, was in his own conceit the 
only Shake-scene in the country.* Greene was 
right, as his surviving friends ere long discovered. 
Their sun had set ; and it was well for them that 
they all died soon after. They could not forgive 

* See the passage in question, given verbatim and in full, and 
its significance with regard to Shakespeare's early labors set forth, 
in the Essay on the Authorship of King Henry the Sixth, Vol. 
VIL pp. 408-412 of the author's edition of Shakespeare's Works. 



92 



MEMOIRS OF 



Shakespeare his superiority ; but he forgave at 
least one of them his envy ; for when, a few years 
after, he wrote As You Like It, he made Phebe say 
of Marlowe, quoting a Hne from Hero and Leaitder, 

" Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, 
' Who ever loved that loved not at first sight ? ' " 

Greene sank into his grave, his soul eaten up with 
envy as his body with disease ; but he was spared 
the added pang of foreseeing that his own name 
would be preserved in the world's memory only 
because of his indirect connection with the man 
at whom he sneered, and that he would be chiefly 
known as his slanderer. Had he lived to see his 
book published, he would have enjoyed such base 
and pitiful satisfaction as can be given by revenge. 
His little arrow reached its mark, and the wound 
smarted. As the venom of a sting often inflicts 
more temporary anguish than the laceration of a 
fatal hurt, such wounds always smart, although 
they rarely injure ; and few men are wise and 
strong enough to bear their suflering in dignity 
and silence. Whether, if Greene had been alive, 
Shakespeare would have publicly noticed his at- 
tack, can only be conjectured ; but I feel sure that 
he would have been kept from open wrangle with 
such an assailant by his reticence and self-respect. 
Yet, although he was above petty malice and re- 
crimination, he was sore and indignant ; and he, 
and others for him, protested against the wrong 
which had been done him in Greene's pamphlet. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



93 



He did not protest in vain ; for Chettle, Greene's 
editor, although he treated with great contempt a 
like complaint of disrespect on the part of Mar- 
lowe, whom Greene had also slurred, apologized to 
Shakespeare in a tract called TJie Kind Heart's 
Dremn, which he published immediately afterward, 
saying that, although he was personally guiltless 
of the wrong, he was as sorry as if the original 
fault had been his own to have offended a man so 
courteous, so gifted, and one who, by his worth 
and his ability, had risen high in the esteem of 
many of his superiors in rank and station.* Greene 
died in the autumn of 1592, and his pamphlet and 
Chettle's were both published in the same year. 
Thus Shakespeare, within six or seven years of his 
departure from Stratford a fugitive adventurer, 
had won admiration from the public, respect from 
his superiors, and the consequent hate of some, 
and, what is so much harder of attainment, the 
regard of others, among those who were his equals, 
except in his surpassing genius. 

These two pregnant passages, which we owe to 
the malice of a disappointed rival, are the first 
public notice of Shakespeare, and our earliest au- 
thentic record of his presence in London.f By 

* See Chettle's apology in full and verbatim in the Essay on the 
Authorship of King Hettiy the Sixth, Vol. VII. p. 410, as above. 

+ In 1835 ^^' John Payne Collier published a small volume en- 
titled New Facts regarding the Life of Shakespeare., in which he 
brought to notice six documents as having been found at Bridge- 
water House among the papers of Lord Ellesmere, who was 



QA MEMOIRS OF 

this time he had produced, in addition to his con- 
tributions to partnership plays and to old ones 
partly rewritten, T/ie Comedy of Errors, Loves La- 

Chancellor in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. One of these 
documents was an unsigned certificate or memorandum, intended 
apparently for the Privy Council, exculpating the players at the 
Black-friars Theatre from a charge of having meddled in matters 
of state and religion, which had been brought against the thea- 
tres generally in 1589. Among the names of the players men- 
tioned in this paper as sharers in the theatre appears that of 
William Shakespeare, which stands twelfth on the list. The doc- 
ument is as follows : — 

"These are to sertifie yor right honorable LL, that her Ma*^ 
poore playeres James Burbidge Richard Burbidge John Laneham 
Thomas Greene Robert Wilson John Taylor Anth. Wadeson 
Thomas Pope George Peele Augustine Phillippes Nicholas Tow- 
ley William Shakespeare William Kempe William Johnson Bap- 
tiste Goodale and Robert Armyn being all of them sharers in the 
blacke Fryers playehouse haue neuer given cause of displeasure, 
in that they haue brought into their playes maters of state and 
Religion, vnfitt to be handled by them or to be presented before 
lewde spectators neither hath anie complainte in that kinde ever 
beene preferrde against them, or anie of them Wherefore, they 
trust most humblie in yor Lis consideracion of their former good 
behauiour being at all tymes readie and willing to yeelde obedi- 
ence to any comaund whatsoever yor LI in yor wisdome may 
thinke in such case meete, &c. 

"Nov. 1589." 

Until recently this memorandum was received as genuine ; and 
were it so, it would show us that, within three years after his ar- 
rival at London, William Shakespeare had advanced from the 
position of servitor, apprentice, or hired man in the Lord Cham- 
berlain's company to that of a sharer in the receipts of the com- 
pany, not that of a proprietor of the theatre. But suspicion of 
the genuineness of the documents brought forward by Mr, Col- 
lier having been excited, this, among the others, was carefully 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



95 



boi^^s Lost, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona ^ his 
earliest original productions. He was already 
thriving, with prosperity in prospect. But he had 

examined by the most eminent palaeographists in London, some 
of them holding high official positions, and all pronounced it a 
forgery. The facts in regard to the investigation of the character 
of these documents will be found in Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton's 
Inquiry, Sec, 4to, London, i860 ; Dr. Mansfield Ingleby's Com- 
plete View of the Shakespeare Controversy, London, 1861 ; Mr. Duf- 
fus Hardy's Review of the Present State of the Shakespearian Con- 
trover sy, London, i860 ; and in The Shakespeare Mystery, in the 
Atlantic Monthly, Sept., 1S61. It is possible, though very im- 
probable, that the judgment pronounced by such high palaeo- 
graphic authorities may be incorrect ; but the documents are put 
by this decision out of question as evidence of the bare and 
meagre facts in Shakespeare's life which they profess to establish. 
In Spenser's Teares of the Muses, printed in 1591, a passage be- 
ginning with the lines, — 

"And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made 
To mock her selfe, and Truth to imitate, 
With kindly counter under mimick shade. 
Our pleasant Willy, ah, is dead of late," — 

has been held to refer to Shakespeare ; chiefly, it would seem, be- 
cause of the name, Willy. But that, like *' shepherd," was not 
uncommonly used merely to mean a poet, and was distinctly ap- 
plied to Sir Philip Sidney in an Eclogue preserved in Davidson's 
/"(^^/zm/ ^/^a/j-<?^', published in 1602. And the Teares of the Mu- 
ses had certainly been written before 1590, when Shakespeare 
could not have risen to the position assigned by the first poet of 
the age to the subject of this passage, and probably in 1580, when 
Shakespeare was a boy of sixteen in Stratford. Indeed, the no- 
tion that Spenser had him in mind would not merit even this at- 
tention, were it not that my readers might suppose that I had 
passed it by through inadvertence. All that ingenuity and per- 
sistent faith can urge in support of it the reader will find in Mr. 
Knight's and Mr. Collier's biographies of the poet. 



96 



MEMOIRS OF 



literary ambition which play-writing did not satis- 
fy (for that he did as a conveyancer draws deeds, 
— as business) ; and he had a poem written ; so 
he still looked about for a patron. Now, there 
was at this time in London a nobleman of high 
rank and large wealth, Henry Wriothesley, Earl 
of Southampton, who had a genuine love of let- 
ters, and who was just upon the threshold of a 
lordly life. As yet he had not exhibited in any 
marked degree the high spirit, the fine capacity 
of appreciation, the graciousness, and the generos- 
ity which made him afterward admired and loved 
of all men at the court of Queen Elizabeth. For 
at the publication of Greene's pamphlet he was 
but nineteen years old, and Shakespeare was nine 
years his senior. Loving literature and the soci- 
ety of men of letters, he had a special fondness 
/or the drama, and, being a constant attendant up- 
on the theatre, he saw much of Shakespeare and 
his plays ; and there can be no doubt that he was 
one of those " divers of worship " whose respect 
for the poet's " uprightness of dealing " and admi- 
ration of his "facetious grace in writing" Chettle 
assigns as one reason for his apology to a man 
whom, it is very easy to see, he did not think it 
prudent to offend.* Shakespeare must have had 

* The meaning of the word " facetious " in this well-known pas- 
sage has been very generally misunderstood, and by none more 
completely than by Miss Bacon, who rested her misapprehension 
of Shakespeare's rank among his contemporaries much on Chet- 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



97 



some acquaintance with Southampton at this time, 
and have felt that he was in his Lordship's favor. 
For to him he determined to dedicate his Vemis 
and Adonis, although he had not asked permission 
to do so, as the dedication shows ; and in those 
days, in fact at any time, without some knowledge 
of his man and some opportunity of judging how 
he would receive the compliment, a player would 
not have ventured to take such a liberty with the 
name of a nobleman. In the next year (1593) 
the closing of the London theatres on account of 
the plague afforded a favorable occasion for the 
publication of the poem, and it was printed by 
Richard Field, a Stratford man. It immediately 
won its author a high literary reputation. Before 
a year had passed a new edition was called for ; 
a third was published in 1596, and two others with- 
in nine years of its first appearance. Southamp- 
ton must have been a churl not to be gratified at 
the homage of such a poet ; and being a man 
whose rank was the mere pedestal, and whose 

tie's use of this epithet, upon which she rung a never-ending 
change of sneers. But " facetious " here has no reference to that 
light comic vein of speech to which it is now exclusively applied. 
It was used in Shakespeare's time in a sense combining our terms 
" felicitous " and " fastidious " in regard to style. Thus Thomas 
Sackville, Earl of Dorset, a grave statesman as well as an accom- 
plished man of letters, who in his very youth wrote only serious 
and sententious works, is said by Naunton to have been " so facete 
and choice in his phrase and style " when drafting state papers, 
that his secretaries could rarely please him. 

5 *G 



98 



MEMOIRS OF 



wealth the mere adornment, of his real nobility, 
he acknowledged Shakespeare's compliment in a 
manner both munificent and considerate. Tradi- 
tion tells us the former ; a second dedication, the 
latter. In the dedication of his Venus a7id Adonis y 
which we must not forget that Shakespeare re- 
garded as his first appearance as an author, he 
expressed a fear that he might offend the young 
Earl by connecting his name with the first heir of 
his invention ; but he promised that, if his patron 
were only pleased, he would devote all the time 
that he could steal from the daily labor of playing 
and play- writing to some graver labor in his honor. 
Such a work, we may be sure, he then already had 
in mind ; for in the very next year appeared the 
Lucrece, a grave and even tragic poem, showing 
much greater maturity of thought and style than 
its predecessor, and dedicated also to Southamp- 
ton. But the tone of the poet toward the patron is 
now very different from what it was a year before ; 
although it is still tainted with that deference of 
simple manhood to privilege, which, in the time of 
Elizabeth, Englishmen of Shakespeare's rank, no 
matter what their age, their ability, or their char- 
acter, must needs pay to English lads of South- 
ampton's. How is it now, except among those 
Englishmen who have never bowed again under 
the yoke of privilege which their forefathers cast 
off" in the days when Milton was our mouthpiece 
and Cromwell our leader ? 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. qq 

It is evident from this dedication, that the Earl 
had done something more than seem pleased with 
its predecessor. Shakespeare speaks in it of a 
warrant which he had of his patron's honorable 
disposition that makes him sure of acceptance, 
and adds, " What I have done is yours ; what I 
have to do is yours ; being part in all I have, de- 
voted yours." This is not flattery, or even defer- 
ence : words of acknowledgment could not be 
stronger. On this evidence alone it is plain that 
something had passed between Shakespeare and 
the Earl which had bound the former entirely to 
the latter by lasting ties of gratitude. Again cir- 
cumstance and tradition strengthen and eke out 
each other. A story reached Rowe through Da- 
venant (would that so excellent a thing had been 
preserved in a cleaner vessel !) that Southampton 
gave Shakespeare a thousand pounds to make a 
purchase of importance. Now, it so happened 
that in 1594 the Globe Theatre was built by the 
company to which Shakespeare belonged, in all 
the property of which we know that he became a 
lar2:e owner. The sum which the Earl is said to 
have given to Shakespeare is so very large, — be- 
ing equal to thirty thousand dollars at our present 
rate of value, that, while the world has willingly 
believed the substance of the story, many have 
doubted the correctness of its details. And yet, 
remembering the customs of those times, the 
more we consider how splendid a fellow young 

L.ofC. 



100 MEMOIRS OF 

Southampton was, how munificent to men of let- 
ters, how whole-hearted to his friends, the more 
we shall be ready to receive the story of his gen- 
erosity to Shakespeare without abatement. We 
know that the Earl of Essex gave Bacon — then 
only Mr. Francis Bacon, a rising young barrister 
— an estate worth eighteen hundred pounds, — 
nearly twice as much as Southampton's reported 
gift to Shakespeare. And the story that Sir 
Philip Sidney, on reading the first stanza of The 
Faeide Qiieene, which had been sent to him in 
manuscript, directed fifty guineas to be given to 
the author, which he doubled on reading the sec- 
ond, and raised to two hundred as he went on, at 
least shows the way in which the higher class of 
Englishmen of noble birth treated the higher 
class of men of letters in the days of Queen 
Elizabeth. This story is probably not true, be- 
cause Sidney was not rich ; but Southampton 
was. When only eight years old he inherited 
large estates, which, being well cared for during 
his minority, made him one of the wealthiest of 
his class when he came of age. He used his 
money with discriminating liberality. John Flo- 
rio, George Chapman, Thomas Nash, and Francis 
Beaumont, all sing his praises. Florio says, in 
the dedication of his World of Words to the Earl 
of Rutland, the Earl of Southampton, and the 
Countess of Bedford, in 1598: "In truth I ac- 
knowledge an entyre debt, not onely of my best 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 10 1 

knowledge, but of all ; yea of more than I can or 
know to your bounteous lordship, most noble, 
most vertuous and most Honorable Earle of South- 
ampton, in whose paie and patronage I have lived 
some yeeres ; to whom I owe and vow the yeeres 
I have to live. But as to me and manie more, the 
glorious and gracious sunneshine of your honour 
hath infused light and life." " Who," asks Beau- 
mont, "lives on England's stage and knows him 
not.''" Chapman calls him, in his Iliad, "the 
choice of all our country's noblest spirits " ; and 
Nash says, " Incomprehensible is the height of 
his spirit," and calls him " a dear lover and cher- 
isher as well of the lovers of poets as of poets 
themselves." Nor should we be troubled about 
any loss of manly dignity on Shakespeare's part 
by the acceptance of such a gift. For there need 
be no doubt that there was a genuine friendship 
between these men, in spite of their difference of 
rank. Nay, wise Francis Bacon would say, by 
very reason of that difference. "There is little 
friendship in the world," (thus he closes his essay 
Of Followers and Friends^ " and least of all be- 
tween equals, which was wont to be magnified. 
That that is, is between superior and inferior 
whose fortunes may comprehend the one the 
other." In those days there might be such 
friendship between a peer and a player, because 
then classes were sharply defined, and rank meant 
something ; and therefore the creature now called 



102 MEMOIRS OF 

"snob" did not exist. Henry VIIL, who defied 
the Pope, could be a frequent guest at the table 
of simple Sir Thomas More, and afterward be- 
head him. Queen Elizabeth could on one day 
complain to a proud Earl, when he saluted her, 
that he did not put his knee well to the ground, 
and on another go in state to dine with the rough 
sailor Francis Drake, in his little ship, the Golden 
Hind. She could do the one because she could 
do the other. If the Earl had left Shakespeare a 
thousand pounds by will, no objection would have 
entered any mind ; and must a man die before he 
can do another a substantial service .'* Does dig- 
nity require us to insist that a friend shall lose 
the pleasure of benefiting us, and we be released 
from the obligation of gratitude } Does one 
friend ever lower himself by accepting freely 
what another freely gives, and can afford to give, 
for friendship's sake ? In countries where land 
and wealth and privilege pertain to a compara- 
tively small class, such gifts are but noble, though 
inadequate, attempts to do away some of the 
wrongful consequences of established inequality ; 
and although it is more manly and independent 
to enjoy rights, than to receive compensation for 
the lack of those rights by way of favor, we must 
judge Southampton's literary friends by the so- 
cial canons of an aristocracy in the sixteenth 
century, and not by those of a democracy in the 
nineteenth. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



103 



Between 1592 and 1596 Shakespeare produced, 
in addition to his Lucrece, King Richard the Third, 
A Midsummer - Nigh f s Dream, The Merchant of 
Venice, King Richard the Second, and some of his 
Sonnets ; probably also Romeo and ynliet and 
(with the name " Love's Labor 's Won") AlVs Well 
that Ends Well, in earlier forms than those in 
which they have come down to us ; — works, 
which, although none of them exhibited his genius 
in its full height and power, effectually established 
his supremacy among his contemporaries as a poet 
and a dramatist. England now began to ring 
with his praises. His brother dramatists made 
their lovers long for his Venus and Adonis by 
which to court their mistresses ; other poets made 
their chaste heroines compare themselves to the 
Lucretia whom he had "revived to live another 
age " ; they sung of his " hony-flowing vein," and 
that he had given new immortality even to the god- 
dess of love and beauty ; and some of them paid 
him the unequivocal compliment of plagiarism.* 
Even Spenser, then at the height of his fame and 
his court favor, having in mind Shakespeare's two 

* See Willoughby's Avisa, 1594; Drayton's Matilda, 1594; 
Barnefield's Poems in Divers Himiors, 1598; Heywood's Fair 
Maid of the Exchange, 1607, but written some years before; 
Phillis and Flora, by R. S., 1598; and Nicholson's Acolastus his 
Afterwitte, 1600. In " A Letter from England to her Three 
Daughters," reprinted in the British Bibliographer, (Vol. I. pp. 
274-285,) and which forms the second part of a book called 
Polimanteia, published in 1595, there is a marginal note, "All 
praise worthy Lucretia Sweete Shakespeare.''' 



jQ. MEMOIRS OF 

martial histories and his name, generously paid 
the young poet this pretty compliment in Colin 
Clout 's come Home again, written in 1 594 : — 

" And there, though last not least, is ^tion ; 
A gentler Shepheard may no where be found ; 
Whose muse full of high thought's invention 
Doth, like himselfe, heroically sound." * 

Nay, in this interval Colin Clout's mistress, the 
imperial Elizabeth herself, distinguished him by 
her favor, won, or acknowledged, by the exquisite 
compliment in A MidsummenNight s Dream. For 
we know upon Ben Jonson's and Henry Chet- 
tle's testimony, and from tradition, that she did 
delight in him ; and it is not in mortal woman, 
least of all was it in Elizabeth, to know of such a 
compliment, and not to hear it and be captivated.f 

* It may be worth while to say, that if Shakespeare's name had 
been Shaksper or Shakspere, as some would have it, this compli- 
ment would have been impossible. 

t These well-known lines are from Jonson's verses in memory 
of Shakespeare, which were published in the folio of 1623 : — 

*' Sweet Swan of Avon, what a sight it were 
To see thee in our waters yet appeare. 
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames, 
That so did take Eliza and our James." 

On the death of Queen Elizabeth, Chettle, in his England's 
Mourning Garment, thus reproached Shakespeare that his verse 
had not bewailed his own and England's loss : — 

" Nor doth the silver-tongued Melicert 
Drop from his honied Muse one sable tear, 
To mourne her death that graced his desert, 
And to his lines opened her royal eare. 
Shepheard remember our Elizabeth, 
And sing her rape done by that Tarquin, Death." 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



105 



Having this evidence of his reputation, and 
other of an equally pleasing and satisfactory 
character as to his increase in wealth, we can 
afford to be very indifferent in regard to the 
trustworthiness of a document about which there 
has been much ado, and the only interest of which 
consists in the fact that it enumerates Shakespeare 
among the owners of the Black-friars Theatre, 
and names him fifth among eight ; but which, 
after a life of thirty years of antiquarian glory, 
has been " done to death by envious tongues " as 
spurious.* A like fate has befallen a memoran- 

* This document exists in the State Paper Office at West- 
minster. (London.) It was brought to public notice by Mr. 
Collier in his History of English Dramatic Poetry^ &c., 1 83 1. 
(Vol. I. p. 297.) It professes to be an answer to a remonstrance 
by thirty inhabitants of the Liberty of the Black-friars, " some of 
them of honor," against the repairing of the Black-friars Theatre. 
The remonstrance was said by Mr. Collier to be " preserved in the 
State Paper Office " ; but it is not to be found there. This reply 
is so genuine in appearance, that it was given in fac-simile even by 
Mr. Halliwell, in his great folio edition of Shakespeare's Works, 
although that gentleman was one of the first to pronounce many 
of the Collier Shakespeare MSS. spurious. It is as follows : — 

" To the right honorable the Lords of her Mat^^^ most honora- 
ble privie Counsell. 

" The humble petition of Thomas Pope Richard Burbadge John 
Hemings Augustine Phillips Willm Shaksepeare Willim Kempe 
Willim Slye Nicholas Tooley and others, seruaunts to the right 
honorable the L. Chamberlaine to her Ma*'^. 

" Sheweth most humbly that yor petitioners are owners and 
playei-s of the priuate house or theater in the precinct and libertie 
of the Blackfriers, wch hath beene for manie yearse vsed and oc- 
cupied for the playing of tragedies commedies histories enter- 
5* 



I06 MEMOIRS OF 

dum which would otherwise show us that at this 
time Shakespeare lived in the part of London 
called Southwark. Malone speaks of a certain 

ludes and playes. That the same by reason of hauing beene soe 
long built hath falne into great decaye and that besides the repa- 
ration thereof it hath beene found necessarie to make the same 
more conuenient for the entertainement of auditories comming 
thereto. That to this end yor petitioners haue all and eche of 
them putt downe sommes of money according to their shares in 
the saide theater and whch they haue justly and honestlie gained 
by the exercise of their qualitie of Stage-players but that certaine 
persons (some of them of honour) inhabitants of the said precinct 
and libertie of the Blackfriers have as yor petitioners are en- 
fourmed besought yor honorable Lps not to permitt the saide pri- 
uate house anie longer to remaine open but hereafter to be shut 
vpp and closed to the manifest and great injurie of yor petitioners 
who have no other meanes whereby to maintaine their wiues and 
families but by the exercise of their qualitie as they have hereto- 
fore done. Furthermore that in the summer season yor petition- 
ers are able to playe at their newe built house on the Bankside 
callde the Globe but that in the winter they are compelled to 
come to the Blackfriers and if yor honorable Lps giue consent 
vnto that whch is prayde against yor petitioners thay will not 
onely while the winter endureth loose the meanes whereby they 
nowe support them selues and their families but be vnable to 
practise them selues in anie playes or enterluds when calde upon 
to performe for the recreation and solace of her Matie and her 
honorable Court, as they have beene heretofore accustomed. 
The humble prayer of yor petitioners therefore is that your 
honble Lps will graunt permission to finishe the reparations and 
alterations they have begunne and as your petitioners have hith- 
erto been well ordred in their behauiour and just in their deal- 
inges that yor honorable Lps will not inhibit them from acting at 
their aboue named priuate house in the precinct and libertie of 
the Blackfriers and your petitioners as in dutie most bounden 
will ever praye for the increasing honour and happinesse of yor 
honorable Lps." 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



107 



paper which was before him as he wrote, which 
belonged to Edward Alleyn, the eminent and pub- 
lic-spirited player, and from which it appeared 

This document being in a public office, upon a grave suspicion 
of its genuineness, Sir John Romilly, Master of the Rolls, or- 
dered a palaeographic examination of it to be made ; and there is 
now appended to it the following certificate : — 

"We, the undersigned, at the desire of the Master of the 
Rolls, have carefully examined the document hereunto annexed, 
purporting to be a petition to the Lords of her Majesty's Privy 
Council, from Thomas Pope, Richard Burbadge, John Hemings, 
Augustine Phillips, William Shakespeare, William Kempe, Wil- 
liam Slye, Nicholas Tooley, and others, in answer to a petition 
from the inhabitants of the Liberty of the Black-friars ; and we 
are of opinion that the document in question is spurious. 

"FrA. PaLGRAVE, K. H., Deputy Keeper of H. M. Public Records. 
Frederic Madden, K. H., Keeper of the MSS., British Museum. 
J. S. Brewer, M. a., Reader at the Rolls. 
T. DUFFUS Hardy, Assistant Keeper of Records. 
N. E. S. A. Hamilton, Assistant, Dep. of MSS., British Museum. 
** 30th January, i860." 

The following professed copy of a letter from the Earl of 
Southampton, concerning Shakespeare, is now pronounced spu- 
rious with an equal weight of authority. 

" My verie honored Lord. The manie good offices I haue re- 
ceiued at your Lordship's hands, which ought to make me back- 
ward in asking further favors, onely imbouldeneth me to require 
more in the same kinde. Your Lordship will be warned howe 
hereafter you graunt anie sute, seeing it draweth on more and 
greater demaunds. This which now presseth is to request your 
Lordship, in all you can, to be good to the poore players of the 
Black Fryers, who call them selves by authoritie the servaunts 
of his Majestie, and aske for the protection of their most gracious 
Maister and Sovereigne in this the tyme of their troble. They 
are threatened by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, 
never friendly to their calling, with the distruction of their 



I08 MEMOIRS OF 

that in 1596 Shakespeare lived in Southwark, 
near the Bear Garden. Malone makes this state- 
ment in his Inquiry into the Authenticity of Cer- 
tain Papers, which were forged by that scapegrace 
William Ireland ; and eminent palaeographers and 
Shakespearian scholars will have it that there 

meanes of livelihood, by the pulling downe of their plaiehouse, 
which is a priuate theatre, and hath neuer giuen occasion of 
anger by anie disorders. These bearers are two of the chiefe 
of the companie ; one of them by name Richard Burbidge, who 
humblie sueth for yom- Lordship's kinde helpe, for that he is a 
man famous as our English Roscius, one who fitteth the action 
to the word, and the word to the action most admirably. By the 
exercise of his qualitye, industry, and good behaviour, he hath 
be come possessed of the Blacke Fryers playhouse, which hath 
bene imployed for playes sithence it was builded by his Father, 
now nere 50 yeres agone. The other is a man no whitt less de- 
serving favor, and my especiall friende, till of late an actor of 
good account in the companie, now a sharer in the same, and 
writer of some of our best English playes, which, as your Lord- 
ship knoweth, were most singularly liked of Queue Elizabeth, 
when the companie was called uppon to performe before her 
Maiestie at Court at Christmas and Shrovetide. His most gra- 
cious Maiestie King James alsoe, sence his coming to the crowne, 
hath extended his royal favour to the companie in divers waies 
and at sundrie tymes. This other hath to name William Shake- 
speare, and they are both of one countie, and indeede allmost of 
one towne : both are right famous in their qualityes, though it 
longeth not of your Lo. grauitie and wisedome to resort vnto 
the places where they are wont to delight the publique eare. 
Their trust and sute nowe is not to bee molested in their way of 
life, whereby they maintaine them selves and their wives and 
families, (being both marled and of good reputation) as well as 
the widows and orphanes of some of their dead fellows. 
" Your Lo most bounden at com. 
" Copia vera:' " H. S." 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



109 



was contamination in the subject, and that the 
following brief memorandum, which Mr. Collier 
brought forward as the paper to which Malone 
referred, is also spurious. 

" Inhabitantes of Sowtherk as have complaned 
this [o]f Jully, 1596. 

Mr. Markis 

Mr. Tuppin 

Mr. Langorth 

Wilson the pyper 

Mr. Barett 

Mr. Shaksper 

Phellipes 

Tomson 

Mother Golden the baude 

Nagges 

Fillpott and no more and soe well ended." 

It may be that this is a delusion, deliberately 
contrived. If it be, the rogue has baited his trap 
so well that he shall have me a willing prey. I 
cannot easily believe that such a genuine-seeming 
glimpse of real life is artificial ; and I am loath 
to lose those neighbors of William Shakespeare 
upon whom his calm and searching glances fell, 
and who watched with curiosity the handsome 
player-poet as he went in and out on his way 
to and from the Black-friars. I sympathize too 
heartily with the writer as he shuts his ears 
against Wilson the piper, who had the real Lin- 
colnshire drone, — I have Falstaif's word for it, — 
and as he tosses off Fillpot with such a round Amen 



IIQ MEMOIRS OF 

of thankfulness. I mourn the vanishing Nagges, 
whom I think of as a humble kind of Silence, or 
perhaps Goodman Verges, and feel injured at the 
assertion that Mother Golden — Mrs. Quickly in 
the flesh, and plenty of it — is a myth ; than 
which nothing could be more deplorable, except, 
indeed, that she were virtuous. 

The last five years of the sixteenth century are 
among the most interesting and important in the 
history of Shakespeare's life. He was then rap- 
idly attaining the independent position which he 
coveted, and for which he labored ; while growth, 
culture, and experience were uniting in the de- 
velopment of those transcendent powers which 
reached their grand perfection in the next decade. 
To those years may be confidently assigned the 
production of Romeo and Juliet in its second and 
final form, King Johny the two Parts of King 
Henry the Foin'th, the first sketch of The Merry 
Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, 
Twelfth Night, King Henry the Fifth, As You 
Like It, and Hamlet. They were probably pro- 
duced in this order, the first in 1596, the last in 
1600. The man who could put those plays upon 
the stage at a time when play-going was the fa- 
vorite amusement of all the better and brighter 
part of the London public, gentle and simple, was 
sure to grow rich, if he were but prudent ; and 
Shakespeare was prudent, and even thrifty. He 
knew the full worth of money. He felt the truth 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. HI 

told in the simile of Franklin (in the large grasp 
of his worldly wisdom the Bacon of democracy), 
that it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright. 
And he saw that pecuniary independence is abso- 
lutely necessary to him who is seeking, as he 
sought, a social position higher than that to 
which he was born. Therefore he looked after 
his material interests much more carefully than 
after his literary reputation. The whole tenor of 
his life shows that he labored as a playwright 
solely that he might obtain the means of going 
back to Stratford to live the life of an indepen- 
dent gentleman. His income now began to be 
considerable ; and there are yet remaining rec- 
ords of the care with which he invested his 
money, and his willingness to take legal measures 
to protect himself against small losses. It is not 
pleasant to think of the author of The ATerchant of 
Venice going to law to compel the payment of a 
few pounds sterling : it would be revolting, if the 
debtor's failure were because of poverty. But as 
we have to face the fact, we may find comfort in 
the certainty that a man of that sweetness of dis- 
position which is attributed to him by his con- 
temporaries, could not have been litigious, and in 
the probability that he knew too much of human 
nature and of the law to commence a suit, unless 
to protect himself against fraud, or to decide a 
legal liability. He who so pitilessly painted Shy- 
lock could not but have felt the truth of the max- 
im, Summtcm Jus, sunima injuria. 



112 



MEMOIRS OF 



Filial piety, unhappily, is not always a sign of 
generosity of soul ; for hard masters, cruel credit- 
ors, and selfish friends are sometimes devoted 
sons ; but it is pleasant, in remarking upon 
Shakespeare's thrift, to record that one of the 
earliest uses of his prosperity seems to have been 
the relief of his father from the consequences of 
misfortune. The little estate of Ashbies, part 
of Mary Arden's inheritance, which had been 
mortgaged to Edmund Lambert in 1578, should 
have been released by the conditions of the mort- 
gage on the repayment of the mortgage-money 
on or before the 29th of September, 1580. The 
mortgagors tendered the money, forty pounds ; 
but they owed Lambert more, upon another obli- 
gation ; and he, having possession, and knowing 
John Shakespeare's inability to incur law ex- 
penses, refused to release Ashbies unless the other 
debt, for which it was not given as security, was 
discharged also. But in 1597, John Shakespeare 
and his wife ventured upon that most trying and 
expensive of all legal proceedings, a chancery 
suit, to compel John Lambert, the son and heir 
of Edmund, to restore the estate. There can be 
no reasonable doubt that the money necessary to 
this proceeding, and the prompting to undertake 
it, came from William Shakespeare, incited by 
filial love and attachment to ancestral fields. 

Previously to this date, — how long v/e do not 
know, but it was certainly some months before 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Ijo 

October, 1596, — John Shakespeare applied to 
the Heralds' College (and, if we are to believe 
the records, not for the first time) for a grant of 
coat-armor, by which he, then a yeoman, might 
attain the recognized position of a gentleman. 
Such applications were then customarily made by 
men who deemed themselves of sufficient impor- 
tance to enter the pale of gentry. The arms, if 
granted, were of value ; for they were an official 
and universally recognized certificate of a certain 
social standing, which those to whom they were 
granted were required to show that they were 
in condition creditably to support. It has been 
conjectured that John Shakespeare made this ap- 
plication at the instigation and with the means — 
for the honor cost money — of his now prosperous 
son. But in the circumstances of the case, and 
in certain evidence which William Shakespeare 
himself unconsciously left upon the subject, there 
seems to be ground for more than a guess that he 
was the real mover in this matter. 

To John Shakespeare, a man now past middle 
life, and without property or position, this empty 
honor would have brought only such distinction 
as a man having the good sense of which his 
career was evidence must have seen was most un- 
enviable. But sustained by the money and the 
influence of his son, prosperous and in favor with 
powerful members of the nobility, he could bear 
up against ridicule. And as far as the son him- 

H 



IT4 



MEMOIRS OF 



self was concerned, aside from the fact that he 
was a player, to whom the heralds would have re- 
fused coat-armor, there was a reason, very cogent 
to a man ambitious of social advancement at that 
time, why the apphcation should be made by the 
father. For, the arms being granted to John 
Shakespeare, William inherited them, and be- 
came a gentleman, not by grant or purchase, but 
by descent, — an important advantage where the 
social scale is graduated by degrees in heraldic 
gentry. But to these reasons add Shakespeare's 
own evidence. It is in that scene of King Lear 
in which the crazy King, his Fool, and the sham- 
madman Edgar are left together in the farm- 
house.* The Fool asks his uncle, "Tell me 
whether a madman be a gentleman or a yeo- 
man " ; and he, forlorn alike of royalty and rea- 
son, with an indirection that has a grand touch of 
heart-break in it, answers, " A king, a king ! " 
But then the Fool rejoins, " No ; he 's a yeoman 
that has a gentleman to his son. For he 's a mad 
yemnan that sees his son a gentleman before him^ 
Now, entirely as Shakespeare avoided mingling 
himself with any of the creatures of his imagina- 
tion, it is absolutely impossible that he should 
have put this mere sententious moralizing into 
the Fool's mouth without a distinct recollection 
of the process by which he became the son of a 
gentleman, as well as the grandson of one on 

* Act III. Scene 6. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



115 



the mother's side. Well-deserved ridicule is now 
heaped, even in Europe, upon weak people who go 
to the heralds to have arms hunted up for them, 
or granted to them ; and wej»ay think it small 
business for the man tO/^!™)se mental grandeur 
this mem.oir is one of^ thousand feeble witness- 
es, thus to go about to make himself a gentleman 
by inheritance. And he himself had a keen ap- 
preciation of the essential absurdity of the whole 
affair. Let any one who doubts read the passage 
in The Winter's Tale^ written years after, in which 
the Clown, having, with his father, received grace 
at court, announces to Autolycus, that he is "a 
gentleman born," and has been so "any time 
these four hours " ; that he was a gentleman born 
before his father ; and that on the occasion in 
question they wept, — and these, he adds, "were 
the first gentleman-like tears that ever we shed." 
Why then, with this perception of the factitious 
nature of heraldic gentry, should Shakespeare 
have desired its possession } From the most sen- 
sible and reasonable of motives ; — simply because 
at his day it brought with it more or less of that 
which every man who is by nature fitted to be a 
gentleman prizes above all other things, except 
his self-respect, — consideration. Consideration ; 
— something different from respect, esteem, or 
love, or even fear ; any, and possibly all, of which 
may pertain to him who has not the other, and 
who, if he be sensitive, and the least lacking in 



jj5 memoirs of 

self-reliance, will therefore fret internally; — some- 
thing the assurance of which, even at the end of 
a diplomatic note, is a rampart of respectful inter- 
course. Congreve has been laughed at because 
he was offended that Voltaire visited him as a 
poet and a man of letters, and Gray subjected to 
a like ridicule, because, when residing at Cam- 
bridge, he desired to be regarded, not as a profes- 
sional scholar and writer, but as a gentleman who 
was fond of literary pursuits. But, society in 
Europe being what it was in their day, Congreve 
and Gray were right.* Nay, even now and here, 
such a feeling, in a certain degree, is but becom- 
ing. Men of letters who are also gentlemen can- 
not fail to see that distinction in their calling 
sometimes wins, and justly wins, only an atten- 
tion different in degree, but not much in kind, 
from that which is lavished upon a mountebank 
or a medium. For between what a man can do 
to amuse, and even to instruct, and what he is, 
there is great difference. He may be wonder- 
fully clever, learned, wise, — may have that mys- 
terious gift which we call genius, — and yet be one 
whom we would not willingly see within the limit 

* Nevertheless it is rather ridiculous to turn men of letters 
into noblemen. Among people who must have lords it was well 
to make dukes of General Churchill and General Wellington, 
a baron of Judge Murray and an earl of the ex- Premier John 
Russell ; but a baron in virtue of brilliant historical essays was 
in a position only a little less absurdly false than a baronet might 
be in virtue of charming idyls. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. j-^y 

of our social circle. Society is not purely an af- 
fair of intellect, or even of moral worth. 

It was, then, for this social consideration that 
William Shakespeare labored and schemed ; that 
he, the Stratford fugitive, might return to his na- 
tive place and meet Sir Thomas Lucy as a pros- 
perous gentleman. But Sir Thomas, I think, with 
that scorn of new men which, it may well be 
feared, is very general, even in republics, endeav- 
ored to check one of his aspirations, — this one 
for coat-armor. The arms were granted, but not 
until three years after they had been applied for, 
and in fact not until that time after a grant of 
them had been drafted. A draft dated October 
20th, 1596, of a grant to John Shakespeare of the 
right to bear a golden silver-headed spear upon 
a black band in a golden shield, with a white 
falcon grasping a golden spear for a crest, still 
exists in the College of Arms ; and from this the 
grant actually issued in 1599 differs only by the 
addition of the right to bear the Arden arms im- 
paled ; impaling, or bearing a second coat upon 
the left half of the shield being the heraldic mode 
of recording marriage with an heiress of the fam- 
ily whose coat is thus displayed. And these doc- 
uments, both sketch and grant, also tell the story 
of the application for the arms. For they were 
made, as they record, upon the ground that " John 
Shakespere, nowe of Stratford upon Avon in the 
counte of Warwik gent., whose parent, great grand- 



Ijg MEMOIRS OF 

father, and late antecessor, for his faithefull and 
approved service to the late most prudent prince 
King H. 7. of famous memorie, was advaunced and 
rewarded with lands and tenements geven to him 
in those parts of Warwikeshere," was, like his an- 
cestors of some descents, in good reputation and 
credit, and also tha:t he had married the daughter 
and one of the heirs of Robert Arden of Wilme- 
cote. Now, John Shakespeare's great-grandfather 
had not been thus distinguished and rewarded by 
Henry VI I. ; but his wife's, and therefore his son's, 
ancestor had ; and of those bedchamber honors 
that son was evidently not forgetful, and deter- 
mined to obtain the fullest advantage. If there be 
littleness in this, it was the age that was in fault, 
and not the man who conformed to prejudices 
which, as we have seen, he really scorned, but was 
not strong enough to override. 

The delay of three years in the granting of these 
arms must have been caused by some opposition to 
the grant ; the motto given with them, Non sans 
droicty (Not without right,) itself seems to assert a 
claim against a denial ; and who so likely to make 
this opposition as the great neighbor of the Shake- 
speares, the Parliament member and justice of 
peace. Sir Thomas Lucy } There is record of cen- 
sure after they were granted. The herald princi- 
pally concerned in conferring them. Sir William 
Dethick, Garter King at Arms, was called to ac- 
count for having granted arms improperly, and the 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



119 



grant to John Shakespeare was among the causes 
of complaint. His justification rested, in a great 
measure at least, upon the allegation upon the mar- 
gin of the draft of 1596, that John Shakespeare 
" sheweth a patent thereof under Clarence Cook's 
hands in paper xx years past"; and in the grant 
of 1 599 it is expressly stated that John Shakespeare 
had "produced this his auncient cote of arms here- 
tofore assigned him whilst he was her Majesties of- 
ficer and baylefe" of Stratford. Because no record 
of this grant is known to exist, it has been hitherto 
supposed that no such grant was made. But it is 
not at all improbable that John Shakespeare, when 
he was bailiff and in the height of his prosperity, 
made application to the heralds for arms at the 
time of one of their visitations, and that the mat- 
ter went as far, at least, as the draft of a grant 
and a sketch, or, as it was called, a trick, of the 
arms, and that, the matter being spoken of in the 
neighborhood, the final grant was stopped at the 
instance of an old county family like the Lucys, 
who were particular about what Mrs. Page of 
Windsor would have called the article of their 
gentry. For in the famous first scene of the com- 
edy in which she appears, where the bearer of the 
coat with the luces is ridiculed, his particularity 
about the antiquity of that coat is made even more 
of than his anger at the stealing of his deer. He 
is Robert Shallow, Esquire, Justice of Peace and 
coram, and ctLst-alomm, and ratalorum too ; and a 



120 MEMOIRS OF 

gentleman born, who writes himself annigero in 
any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation ; and he 
has done it any time these three hundred years ; 
all his successors that have gone before him, and 
all his ancestors that come after him may give the 
dozen white luces in their coat. For, mind you, it 
is an old coat ; and although this ignorant, low- 
bred Welsh parson will mistake a luce for the 
familiar beast to man, and have it passant, you 
are to know that the luce is the fresh fish, and 
that the salt fish is an old coat, and that the 
upstart bailiffs in yonder dirty little town are not 
to be bearing silver-headed tilting-spears upon 
golden shields, and getting within the pale of gen- 
try by marrying poor gentlemen's daughters, and 
by heraldic puns upon their names, when their 
betters, by punning on their names can only bear 
fresh fish, which are subject to unpleasant misap- 
prehension and mispronunciation, and have to be 
salted to keep and attain the honors of antiquity. 
If Shakespeare had two causes of quarrel with the 
man of the luces, he settled the two accounts 
rarely in that short scene of his only comedy of 
English manners; which he wrote in 1598, be- 
tween the date at which the confirmation of his 
father's arms was drafted and that at which it 
was granted. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 121 

IV. 

Shakespeare was now able to take an important 
step toward establishing himself handsomely in 
his native place. In 1597 he bought of William 
Underbill the Great House, or New Place, as it 
was called in Stratford, a mansion built of brick 
and timber, about a hundred and fifty years be- 
fore, by Sir Hugh Clopton, the benefactor of the 
town. It cost Shakespeare sixty pounds sterling 
(equal to about ^1500); a small outlay for the 
dwelling of a man of its new possessor's means 
and capacity of enjoyment. We know from the 
fine levied at the sale, that the premises included 
the Great House itself, two barns, two gardens, 
and two orchards. But from contemporary legal 
documents we learn that in 1550 the house was 
so much in need of repair as to be almost in de- 
cay. This was doubtless the reason why it was 
sold for so small a price. Its owner in the early 
part of the last century. Sir Hugh Clopton, a 
lineal descendant of its builder, told Theobald 
that Shakespeare " repaired and modelled it to his 
own mind " ; and this family tradition is supported 
by the record of the payment in 1598 of "x^" 
to Mr. Shakespeare for " a lod of ston," which was 
probably at the thrifty poet's disposal on account 
of the extensive alterations at New Place. No 
representation of the house as it was in Shake- 
speare's time is known to exist, it having been 
6 



122 MEMOIRS OF 

again much altered by Sir John Clopton in 1700 ; 
yet its size was not enlarged, and an existing rep> 
resentation of it in its last condition shows that it 
was a goodly mansion. But its new master took 
possession bereaved and disappointed. The death 
of his only son, Hamnet, in the twelfth year of his 
age, 1596, left him without a descendant to whom 
he might transmit, with his name, the houses and 
lands and the arms which he had obtained by such 
untiring labor. Shakespeare having money to in- 
vest, of course there was no lack of applicants for 
the pleasure of placing it for him to his advantage. 
Of these was one Master Abraham Sturley, a Pu- 
ritan of the first water. He begins a long letter, 
written at Stratford, January 24th, 1559, to a friend 
in London, (probably Richard Quiney, whose son 
afterward married Shakespeare's daughter,) with 
a pious ejaculation, and then passes promptly to 
business, urging his correspondent to quicken an 
intention which Shakespeare was known to have 
to lay out some of his superfluous money in Strat- 
ford property, and especially to recommend to him 
a purchase of the tithes of Stratford and three 
other parishes, as profitable to himself, beneficial 
to the town, and likely to gain him many friends.* 

* " Most loveinge and belovedd in the Lord. In plaine Eng- 
lishe we remember u in the Lord, & ourselves unto u. I would 
write nothinge unto u nowe, but come home. I prai God send u 
comfortabli home. This is one speciall remembrance ffrom ur 
ffather's motion. It semeth bi him that our countriman, Mr. 
Shakspere, is willinge to disburse some monei upon some od 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. J23 

The recommendation, as we shall hereafter see, 
appears to have had some effect. There is another 
letter of this time, written also to Richard Quiney, 
which contains an obscure mention of a money 
transaction with Shakespeare.* And the fact is 
somewhat striking in the life of a great poet, that 
the only letter directly addressed to Shakespeare 
which is known to exist, is one which asks a loan 
of £^0. It is from Richard Quiney, who at the 
writing was in London, and is as follows ; for this 
money transaction belongs in full to Shakespeare's 
history. 

" Loveinge Contreyman, I am bolde of yo', as of a 
ffrende, craveinge yo""" helpe w**" xxx", uppon M' Bushells 
& my securytee, or M' Myttens with me. M"" Rosswell is 
nott come to London as yeate, & I have especiall cawse. 
Yo' shall ffrende me muche in helpeinge me out of all the 
debtts I owe in London, I thanck god, and muche quiet my 
mynde w"'' wolde not be indebeted. I am now towardes the 
Cowrte, in hope of answer for the dispatche of my Buyse- 
nes. Yo'' shall nether loose creddytt nor monney by me, the 
Lorde wylhnge ; & nowe butt perswade yo"' selfe soe, as I 

yarde land or other att Shottri or neare about us ; he thinketh it 
a veri fitt patterne to move him to deale in the matter of our 
tithes, Bi the instructions u can geve him theareof, & by the 
frendes he can make therefore, we thinke it a faire marke for him 
to shoote att, & not impossible to hitt. It obtained would ad- 
vance him in deede, and would do us much good. Hoc movere, 
et quantum in te est permovere, ne necligas, hoc enim et sibi et 
nobis maximi erit momenti. Hie labor, hoc opus esset eximiae 
et gloriae et laudis sibi." &c., &c. 

* " Yff yow bargen with \Vm. Sh or receve money there- 
for, brynge your money home that yow maye." 



124 MEMOIRS OF 

hope, & yo* shall nott need to feare ; butt with all hartie 

thanckfullnes I wyll holde my tyme & content yo'" frend, 

& yf we Bargaine farther, yo'' shall be the paie m"- yo"' selfe. 

My tyme biddes me to hasten to an ende, & soe I comitt 

thys [to] yo™ care & hope of yo'^ helpe. I feare I shall nott 

be backe this night fFrom the Cowrte. haste, the Lorde be 

w*^ yo^ & w*"" us all. amen. From the Bell in Carter Lane, 

the 25 October 1598. 

a Yo"" in all kyndenes, 

"Ryc. Quyney." 

This letter is addressed " To my loveing good 
fFrend and countreyman Mr. Wm. Shackespere 
delr thees." 

It is impossible to disguise the fact that Quiney 
offers an approved indorsed note to the author 
oi Hamlet ; but it is gratifying to observe that he 
applies to him as a friend. The motive which he 
touches is not interest, but the helping him out 
of trouble ; and though the sum was not a small 
one, — half the price of New Place, — he plainly 
feels that Shakespeare had both the ability and 
the willingness to spare it. There is another let- 
ter of this period, dated November 4th, 1598, ad- 
dressed to the same Richard Quiney by Abraham 
Sturley again. The first part, with which only we 
have concern, begins, "All health happiness of 
suites and wellfare be multiplied unto u and ur 
labours in God our ffather by Christ our Lord," 
and ends, with no less fervor, " O howe can you 
make dowbt of monei who will not bear xxx-tie or 
xl. s towardes sutch a match ! " But its chief in- 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



125 



terest to us is, that the writer of these beatitudes 
has heard that " our countriman Mr. Wm. Shak. 
would procure us monei, wc. I will like of." It is 
pleasant thus to see that Shakespeare's townsmen, 
even the staid and sober men among them, re- 
spected and looked up to him, and leaned confi- 
dently upon the support of his influence and his 
purse. And this marvellous " Mr. Wm. Shak." 
then had real property in London, as well as in 
Stratford, besides his theatrical possessions ; for 
in October of 1598 he was assessed on property in 
the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, £$ i^s. 4^. 

In 1598 Ben Jonson's first and best comedy. 
Every Man in his Humour, was produced at the 
Black-friars, and the author of King Henry the 
Fourth and Romeo and yuliet might have been 
seen for twopence by any London prentice who 
could command the coin, playing an inferior part, 
probably that of Knowell, in the new play. But, 
according to tradition, Shakespeare not only 
played in Jonson's comedy, — he obtained Ben 
his first hearing before a London audience. The 
play had been thrown aside at the Black-friars 
with little consideration, as the production of 
an unknown writer ; but Shakespeare's attention 
having been drawn to it, he read it through, 
admired and recommended it, and then and 
thereafter took pains to bring the author's works 
before the public. Jonson's honest love for 



126 MEMOIRS OF 

Shakespeare may well have had its spring in 
gratitude for this great service, which having 
been performed by one dramatic author for an- 
other, who was his junior, indicates both kindness 
and magnanimity. 

The year 1598 was one of great professional 
triumph to Shakespeare. We may safely accept 
the tradition first mentioned by John Dennis a cen- 
tury later, that in that year he was honored with a 
command from Queen EHzabeth to let her see his 
Falstafif in love, which he obeyed by producing 
in a fortnight The Merry Wives of Windsor in its 
earliest form.* In that year, too, the greatness 
and universality of his genius received formal 
recognition at the hands of literary criticism. 
Francis Meres pubhshed in 1598 a book called 
Palladis Tainia^ Wits Treasury, which was a col- 
lection of sententious comparisons, chiefly upon 
morals, manners, and religion. But one division 
or chapter is "A comparative discourse of our 
English Poets with the Greeke, Latine, and Ital- 
ian Poets." Meres was a Master of Arts in both 
Universities, a theological writer, and the author 
of poetry which has been lost. His comparative 
discourse makes no pretence to analysis or aes- 
thetic judgment. Indeed, according to the modern 
standard, it can hardly be regarded as criticism ; 

* See this tradition, and the facts which bear upon it, dis- 
cussed in the Introduction to The Merry Wives of Windsor^ in 
the author's edition of Shakespeare's Works. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



127 



but it may be accepted as a record of the estima- 
tion in which Shakespeare was held by intelHgent 
and cultivated people when he was thirty-four 
years old, and before he had written his best 
plays. In this book Shakespeare is awarded the 
highest place in English poetical and dramatic 
literature, and is ranked with the great authors 
of the brightest days of Greece and Rome. It is 
true that other poets and dramatists are com- 
pared by Meres to Pindar, ^Eschylus, and Aris- 
tophanes, to Ovid, Plautus, and Horace, and that, 
like all who have judged their contemporaries, he 
bestows high praise upon men whose works and 
names have perished from the world's memory. 
But in his comprehensive eulogy Shakespeare has 
this distinction, that while he shares equally all 
other praise, it is said of him, that, " as Plautus 
and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy 
and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare 
among the English is the most excellent in both 
kinds for the stage." * There is ample evidence 

* The following are all the passages of this chapter of the 
Palladis Tamia in which Shakespeare's name appears. They 
have never been all reprinted before. 

"As the Greekes tongue is made famous and eloquent by 
Homer, Hesiod, Euripedes, ^schylus, Sophocles, Pindarus, 
Phyloclides, and Aristophanes ; and the Latine tongue by Virgile, 
Ouid, Horace, Sicilius Italius, Lucanus, Lucretius, Ausonius, 
and Claudianus, so the English tongue is mightily enriched and 
gorgeously invested in rare ornaments by sir Philip Sidney, 
Spencer, Daniel, Drayton, Warner, Shakespeare, Marlow, and 
Chapman." 



128 MEMOIRS OF 

that this appreciation of Shakespeare was gen- 
eral, and that, although his contemporaries could 
hardly have suspected that his genius would over- 
shadow all others in our literature, they regarded 

" As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to Hue in Pythago- 
ras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ouid Hues in meUifluous and 
hony-tongued Shakespeare ; witnes his Venus and Adonis^ his 
Lucrece, his sugred sonnets among his priuate friends," &c. 

"As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy 
and Tragedy among the Latines : so Shakespeare among y^ Eng- 
Hsh is the most exceUent in both kinds for the stage; for Com- 
edy, witnes his Getleme of Verona, his Errors, his Lone labors 
lost, his Loue labours womie, his Midstinimers night dreaj?ie, & his 
Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy his Richard the 2. Richard 
the 3. Henry the 4. King John, Titus Andronicus and his Ro- 
meo and luliet.'''' 

" As Epius Stolo said, the Muses would speake with Plautus 
tongue, if they would speak Latin ; so I say the Muses would 
speak with Shakespeare's fine-filed phrase, if they would speak 
English." 

" And as Horace saith of his, Exegi monumentu sere perenni- 
us, Regaliq ; situ pyramidum altius ; Quod non imber edax ; 
Non Aquilo impotens possit diruere, aut innumerabilis annorum 
series et fuga temporum ; so say I severally of Sir Philip Sid- 
neys, Spencers, Daniels, Draytons, Shakespeares, and Warner's 
workes." 

"As Pindarus, Anacreon, and Callimachus among the Greekes, 
and Horace and Catullus among the Latines, are the best lyrick 
poets ; so in this faculty the best amog our poets are Spencer 
(who excelleth in all kinds), Daniel Drayton, Shakespeare, 
Bretto." 

"As these tragicke poets flourished in Greece, ^schylus, 
Euripedes, Sophocles, Alexander Aetolus, Achaeus Erithri^us, 
Astydamas Atheniesis, Apollodorus Tarsensis, Nicomachus 
Phrygius, Thespis Atticus, and Timon Apolloniates ; and these 
among the Latines, Accius, M. Attilius, Pomponius Secundus 
and Seneca ; so these are our best for tragedie ; the Lord Buck- 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



129 



him as a poet and a dramatist beyond compari- 
son among his countrymen. Shakespeare's plays 
filled the theatre to overflowing when even Jon- 
son's would hardly pay expenses.* It was not 

hurst, Doctor Leg of Cambridge, Dr. Edes of Oxford, Maister 
Edward Ferris, the Authour of the Mirrour for Magistrates^ 
Marlow, Peele, Watson, Kid, Shakespeare, Drayton, Chapman, 
Decker, and Beniamin lohnson." 

" The best poets for comedy among the Greeks are these : 
Menander, Aristophanes, Eupolis Atheniensis Alexis, Terius, 
Nicostratus, Amipsias Atheniensis, Anaxadrides Rhodius, Aris- 
tonymus, Archippus Atheniesis, and Callias Atheniensis ; and 
among the Latines, Plautus, Terence, Naeuius, Sext. Turpilius, 
Licinius Imbrex, and Virgilius Romanus ; so the best for comedy 
amongst us bee Edward Earle of Oxforde, Doctor Gager of Ox- 
forde, Maister Rowley, once a rare scholler of learned Pem- 
brooke Hall in Cambi'idge, Maister Edwardes, one of her Maies- 
ties Chappell, eloquent and wittie John Lilly, Lodge, Gascoyne, 
Greene, Shakespeare, Thomas Nash, Thomas Heywood, An- 
thony Mundye, our best plotter, Chapman, Porter, Wilson, 
Hathway, and Henry Chettle." 

"As these are famous among the Greeks for elegie, Melan- 
thus, Mymnerus Colophonius, Olympius Mysius, Parthenius 
Nicaeus, Philetas Cous, Theogenes Megarensis, and Pigres Hali- 
carnasoeus ; and these among the Latines, Mecaenas, Quid, Ti- 
bullus, Propertius, T. Valgius, Cassius Seuerus, and Clodius 
Sabinus ; so these are the most passionate among us to bewaile 
and bemoane the perplexities of loue ; Henrie Howard Earle of 
Surrey, sir Thomas Wyat the elder, sir Francis Brian, sir Philip 
Sidney, sir Walter Rawley, sir Edward Dyer, Spencer, Daniel, 
Drayton, Shakespeare, Whetstone, Gascoyne, Samuell Page 
sometimes fellowe of Corpus Christi Colledge in Oxford, Church- 
yard, Bretton." 

* See the following lines from the verses of Leonard Digges, 
prefixed to the edition of Shakespeare's Poems published in 1640. 

" So have I seen, when Caesar would appear. 
And on the stage at half-sword parley were 

6* I 



J 20 MEMOIRS OF 

until the moral and literary decadence of the 
Restoration, and the establishment of the exotic 
and artificial standards of the so-called Augustan 

Brutus & Cassius, O how the audience 

Were ravish'd ! with what wonder they went thence ! 

When, some new day, she would not brook a Hne 

Of tedious, though well-labour'd CatiHne ; 

Sejanus too, was irksome : they priz'd more 

* Honest ' lago, or the jealous Moor. 

And though the Fox «& subtil Alchymist, 

Long intermitted, could not quite be mist, 

Though these have sham'd all th' ancients, & might raise 

Their author's merit with a crown of bays, 

Yet these sometimes, even at a friend's desire, 

Acted, have scarce defray'd the sea-coal fire, 

And door-keepers : when, let but Falstaff come, 

Hal, Poins, the rest — you scarce shall have room, 

All is so pester'd : let but Beatrice 

And Benedick be seen lo ! in a trice 

The cock-pit, galleries, boxes, all are full, 

To hear Malvolio, that cross-garter'd gull. 

Brief, there is nothing in his wit-fraught book. 

Whose sound we would not hear, on whose worth look, 

Like old coin'd gold, whose lines, in every page. 

Shall pass true current to succeeding age." 

In The Return from Parnasstis, a comedy acted certainly be- 
fore the death of Queen Elizabeth by the students of St. John's 
College, Cambridge, but the earliest known copy of which was 
printed in 1606, there is this tribute to the native superiority of 
Shakespeare : — 

*' Kemp. Few of the vniuersity pen plaies well ; they smell 
too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, 
and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, heres our 
fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe ; I and Ben Jonson too. 
O, that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow : he brought up Horace 
giuing the poets a pill ; but our fellow Shakespeare hath giuen 
him a purge that made him beray his credit." 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. I3I 

age of English literature, that he was thought to 
have equals, and even superiors. In spite of 
Shakespeare's manifest and generally acknowl- 
edged superiority, under which Jonson, conscious 
both of larger learning and more laborious effort, 
fretted a little, there was warm friendship be- 
tween the two men, which lasted through Shake- 
speare's life, and the memory of which inspired 
and softened gruff Ben when his friend had 
passed away. There was never more generous 
or more glowing eulogy of one man by another 
than that in Jonson's verses which appeared 
among the preliminary matter to the first folio ; 
and in the well-known passage in his Discover- 
ies, written in his later years, the crusty critic, 
though he must carp at the poet, breaks out into 
a hearty expression of admiration and cherished 
love of the man.* 

* " I remember the Players have often mentioned it as an hon- 
our to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penn'd) 
he never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had 
blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. 
I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose 
that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most 
faulted. And to justifie mine own candor, (for I lov'd the man, 
and doe honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as 
any.) Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open and free nature : 
had an excellent Phantsie, brave notions, and gentle expressions : 
wherein he flow'd with that facility, that sometime it was neces- 
sary he should be stop'd. SitfflaiTiinandus erat, as Augustus said 
of Haterius. His wit was in his owne power, would the rule of 
it had beene so too. Many times he fell into those things, could 
not escape laughter : As when he said in the person of Caesar 



1^2 MEMOIRS OF 

In 1599 Shakespeare received a not very wel- 
come tribute to his poetic eminence. A book- 
seller named Jaggard, who, even in those days of 
extremest Kcense in his craft, was distinguished by 
his disregard of the rights of literary property and 
literary reputation, printed a volume of verses un- 
der the unmeaning title The Passionate Pilgrimy 
upon the title-page of which he impudently placed 
Shakespeare's name, although but a part of its 
meagre contents were from his pen, and that part 
had been surreptitiously obtained. Shakespeare 
was much offended that Jaggard made so bold 
with his name. This we know on the testimony 
of Heywood, who in a second edition saw two of 
his own compositions also attributed to the favor- 
ite of the hour, and who publicly claimed his 
own.* Shakespeare, although offended at the per- 
sonal liberty, seems to have been careless of any 
possible injury to his reputation. No evidence of 
any public denial on his part is known to exist ; 
and it was not until after the publication of the 
third edition of the volume, in 1612, that his name 

one speaking to him, Ccesar thou dost me wrong, Hee replyed : 
CcEsar did never wrong, but with just cause ; and such like ; which 
were ridiculous. But hee redeemed his vices, with his virtues. 
There was euer more in him to be praysed, then to be pardoned." 
Discoveries. De Shakespeare nostrat. Lond., fol., 1640, p. 97. 

* These were two poetic epistles, from Paris to Helen and from 
Helen to Paris. See the postscript to Heywood's Apology for 
Actors, i6i2. The Passionate Pilgri??i was printed only on one 
side of each leaf, to eke out the volume. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1^3 

was taken from the title-page. In 1600 he was 
made for a time to father Sir yohn Oldcastle ; but 
the pubUsher appears to have been speedily un- 
deceived, or compelled to do justice ; for Shake- 
speare's name was omitted from some part of the 
impression. We know from Henslow's Diary that 
Sir John Oldcastle was written by Munday, Dray- 
ton, Wilson, and Hath way, jointly. The removal 
of Shakespeare's name from the title-page was 
more probably owing to their pride and jealousy 
than to Shakespeare's. An edition of King Henry 
the Fifth was published in this year, which shows 
from internal evidence that the bookseller was so 
eager to put this work of Shakespeare's before the 
public that he used a version obtained by surrep- 
titious means, and so mangled as to be almost 
without connection from page to page. A mis- 
fortune, wliich we may well believe was more se- 
riously regarded by Shakespeare than any liberty 
with his reputation, fell upon him also in this year, 
through the plot which cost Essex his head, and 
his friend and Shakespeare's patron, Southamp- 
ton, his liberty during the remainder of Eliza- 
beth's reign. 

The latter years of John Shakespeare's check- 
ered life seem to have been passed in tranquil 
though humble ease, through the filial care of his 
distinguished son. He died in September, 1601, 
as we know by the record of his burial on the 8th 
of that month ; being then, if we set him down 



134 



MEMOIRS OF 



as twenty-one or twenty-two years old when we 
first hear of him at Stratford, somewhat more than 
seventy years of age. His house in Henley Street, 
and probably such other real property as he may 
have owned at the time of his death, descended 
to William, who, though the possessor and occu- 
pier of the Great House which had doubtless im- 
pressed his youthful imagination by its magnitude 
and its village pre-eminence, clung to the memo- 
ries of his humbler home, and always kept it in 
his possession. During the next year he added 
to his landed estate one hundred and seven acres 
of land in the parish of Old Stratford, which 
he bought from the brothers William and John 
a Combe. He also bought a cottage in Henley 
Street from Walter Gettey ; and from Hercules 
Underbill, a messuage with two barns, two or- 
chards, and two gardens. He was not in Strat- 
ford at the time of the completion of the first of 
these purchases, in which he was represented by 
his brother Gilbert. In this year, while he was 
thus rapidly acquiring that landed interest in his 
native county without which no man in his day 
could maintain a respectable position as a gentle- 
man of family, the burgesses of Stratford passed 
an ordinance forbidding the exhibition of plays 
of any kind in the chamber, the guild-hall, or any 
part of the house or court, — a proscription which 
was made more rigid in 1612. Is it strange that 
under these circumstances Shakespeare did not 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



135 



show much solicitude about the careful publication 
of his dramas and the perpetuation of his fame 
as a playwright ? 

The death of Elizabeth in 1603, which gave 
our fathers, instead of a royal family that tyran- 
nized firmly and sagaciously, one that was at once 
despotic, feeble, and vacillating, and whose mon- 
strous outrages upon the rights of Englishmen 
contributed mainly to the founding of an English 
nation upon this continent, produced a change 
in Shakespeare's professional position, traces of 
which remain in the mother country until this day. 
One of King James's earliest warrants under the 
privy seal of England made the company of which 
Shakespeare was a member " His Majesty's ser- 
vants" ; a designation which has since always per- 
tained to the performers at the leading theatre 
of London. In this warrant Shakespeare's name 
appears second, Laurence Fletcher's being first.* 

* It is, verbatim et literatim, thus ; — 
"By the King. 

" Right trusty and welbeloved Counsellor, we greete you well, 
and will and commaund you, that under our privie Seale in your 
custody for the time being, you cause our letters to be derected 
to the keeper of our greate seale of England, commaunding him 
under our said greate Seale, he cause our letters to be made pa- 
tents in forme following. James, by the grace of God, King of 
England, Scotland, Fraunce, and Irland, defendor of the faith, 
&c. To all Justices, Maiors, Sheriffs, Constables, Headbor- 
oughes, and other our officers and loving subjects greeting. 
Know ye, that we of our speciall grace, certaine knowledge, and 



13^ 



MEMOIRS OF 



And in this year, too, if we could believe in the 
authenticity of a letter professing to be written by 
the poet Daniel to Sir Thomas Egerton, and which 
Mr. Collier brought to light in 1835,* Shakespeare 

meere motion have licenced and authorized, and by these pre- 
sentes doe licence and authorize, these our servants, Lawrence 
Fletcher, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Augustine 
Phillippes, John Hemmings, Henrie Condell, William Sly, Rob- 
ert Armyn, Richard Cowlye, and the rest of their associats, freely 
to use & exercise the arte and faculty of playing Comedies, Trage- 
dies, Histories, Enterludes, Moralls, Pastoralls, Stage plaies, and 
such other like, as that thei have already studied or hereafter 
shall use or studie, as well for the recreation of our loving sub- 
jects, as for our solace and pleasure, when we shall thinke good 
to see them, during our pleasure. And the said Comedies, Trage- 
dies, Histories, Enterludes, Moralls, Pastoralls, Stage plaies, and 
such like, to shew & exercise publiquely to their best commo- 
ditie, when the infection of the plague shall decrease, as well 
within theire now usuall howse called the Globe, within our coun- 
ty of Surrey, as also within anie towne halls, or mout halls, or 
other convenient places within the liberties & freedome of any 
other citie, universitie, towne, or borough whatsoever within our 
said realmes and dominions. Willing and commaunding you, 
and every of you, as you tender our pleasure, not only to permit 
and suffer them heerin, without any your letts, hinderances, or 
molestations, during our said pleasure, but also to be ayding or 
assisting to them, yf any wrong be to them offered. And to al- 
lowe them such former courtesies, as hathe bene given to men of 
their place and qualitie : and also what further favour you shall 
shew to these our servants for our sake, we shall take kindly at 
your hands. And these our letters shall be your sufficient war- 
rant and discharge in this behalfe. Given under our Signet at 
our mannor of Greenewiche, the seaventeenth day of May in the 
first yere of our raigne of England, France, and Ireland, & of 
Scotland the six & thirtietli. 

" Ex per Lake." 
* New Facts regarding the Life of Shakespeare. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



137 



applied for the office of Master of the Queen's 
Revels, which, through Sir Thomas Egerton's in- 
fluence, was given to Daniel. The genuineness 
of this letter, in which the allusion to Shakespeare 
is slight and incidental, has been disputed on 
purely palaeographical grounds. But it may also 
be questioned whether Shakespeare would have 
applied at this time for such an office as that of 
Master of the Queen's Revels, which would have 
occupied much of his time and attention ; for he 
was now at the height of his reputation, and was 
gathering a profit from his professional labors for 
the loss of which the position of Master of the 
Queen's Revels would not have been a recom- 
pense. If indeed he did apply for it, the world 
has reason to be thankful at his disappointment. 
For it is to the first ten years of the seventeenth 
century that we owe the great tragedies, Troihis 
and Cressida, Othello, King Lear, Thnon of Ath- 
ens, Macbeth, Julius Ccesar, Antony and Cleopatra, 
and Coriolajius, with Cynibeline, All ^s Well that 
Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Shake- 
speare's part in Pericles and TJie Taming of the 
Shrew, of which all but Pericles and TJie Taming 
of the Shrew were quite surely written after 1603. 
In that year Ben Jonson's Sejanus was pro- 
duced at the Black-friars, and the author of Ham- 
let might have been seen playing a subordinate 
part in it. But about this time he appears to 
have retired from the stage, where, as we have 



138 MEMOIRS OF 

seen, he had gained but little distinction at much 
sacrifice of feeling, and to have confined his labors 
for the theatre to the more congenial occupation 
of play-writing. Chettle, it is true, says that 
Shakespeare was excellent in the quality he pro- 
fessed ; but in that commendation, "quality" may 
include play-writing as well as play-acting ; and 
mayhap it refers with some vagueness to both. 
According to a contemporary epigram by Davies 
(in The Scourge of Folly), which has been pre- 
viously mentioned, Shakespeare played kingly 
parts ; and in so doing offended his new master, 
and marred his fortunes. The verses are not 
clear, as the reader will see. 

" To our English Terence, Mr. Will Shakespeare. 

" Some say, good "Will, which I in sport do sing, 
Had'st thou not plaid some kingly parts in sport, 
Thou had'st bin a companion for a king, 
And beene a king among the meaner sort. 

" Some others raile ; but raile as they thinke fit. 
Thou hast no rayling, but a raigning wit : 
And honesty thou sow'st, which they do reape. 
So to increase their stocke, which they do keepe." 

It cannot be that Shakespeare in playing kingly 
parts ventured to take off " God's vicegerent upon 
earth." The temptation to do so must have been 
great ; but he was too prudent to indulge in a sport 
so expensive and so dangerous. It is difficult to 
see how the mere decorous performance of kingly 
parts could have offended James ; and yet we must 
remember that he was as petty and capricious as 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



139 



he was tyrannical. Nevertheless the king was 
attacked through the players ; of which the fol- 
lowing very direct evidence has been found in a 
treatise on hunting preserved among the Sloane 
MSS. The writer, having censured the players 
for lack of decorum, thus continues : " What mad- 
nesse is it, I saye, that possesseth them under 
faigned persons to be censureing of their sove- 
raigne : surely though these poets for many years 
have, for the most part, lefte foles and devills out 
of their playes, yet nowe on the suddayne they 
make them all playe the foles most notoriouslye 
and impudently in medlinge with him (in waye 
of taxacion) by whome they live and have in man- 
ner there very being." In this grovelling and 
blasphemous style it was the fashion to speak of 
a man who was about as mean and sordid a crea- 
ture as ever lived. 

There is a story which was first printed in Lin- 
tot's edition of Shakespeare's Poems, published 
in 1 7 10, that King James wrote with his own 
hand an amicable letter to Shakespeare, which 
was once in the hands of Davenant, as a credita- 
ble person then living could testify ; and conjec- 
ture, ever ready, has made Macbeth's prophetic 
vision of kings the occasion of the compUment. 
It is well to have a more creditable person than 
Davenant to corroborate such a story ; and 01- 
dys, in a manuscript note to his copy of Ful- 
ler's Worthies, says that the Duke of Bucking- 



140 



MEMOIRS OF 



ham told Lintot that he had seen this letter in 
Davenant's possession. If Oldys meant George 
Villiers, the last Duke of Buckingham, which is 
possible, he added not much to our security for 
the mere existence of such a letter ; but if he 
meant John Sheffield, the first Duke of the Coun- 
ty of Buckingham, which is also possible, we 
can the more readily believe that Davenant pro- 
duced such a letter as that in question, although 
even then we lack satisfactory evidence of its gen- 
uineness. Davenant is poor authority for any 
story about Shakespeare. This one, however, is 
more probable than another which places Shake- 
speare in royal company. It was unheard of till 
late in the eighteenth century, and is to the effect 
that Queen Elizabeth, being at the theatre one 
evening when Shakespeare was playing a king, 
bowed to him as she crossed the stage. He did 
not return the salutation, but went on with his 
part. To ascertain whether the omission was an 
intentional preservation of assumed character, or 
an oversight, the Queen again passed him, and 
dropped her glove. Shakespeare immediately 
picked it up, and, following the royal virgin, hand- 
ed it to her, adding on the instant these lines to a 
speech which he was just delivering, and so aptly 
and easily that they seemed to belong to it. 

" And though now bent on this high embassy, 
Yet stoop we to take up our cousin's glove." 

The Queen, it is said, was highly pleased, and 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. j^j 

complimented him upon his adroitness and his 
courtesy. In judging the credibihty of this story, 
it should be remembered that in Shakespeare's 
time the most distinguished part of the audience 
went upon the stage, during the performance, in 
what must have been a very confusing manner. 
But the anecdote is plainly one made to meet the 
craving for personal details of Shakespeare's life. 
In addition to its inherent improbabihty, Shake- 
speare well knew what the author of the verses 
seems not to have known, — that kings cannot go 
on embassies. Empty compliment and his share 
of payment to the company for services rendered 
seem to have been all the benefit that Shakespeare 
obtained from royal favor. There is not the least 
reason for believing that either the strong-minded 
woman or the weak-minded man in whose reigns 
he flourished recognized his superiority by special 
distinction or substantial reward.* 

* Mr. Peter Cunningham's Extracts from the Accounts of the 
Revels at Court include the following entries of the perform- 
ance of Shakespeare's plays before King James, between 1604 

and 161 1 : — 

The Poets which 
The Plaiers. niayd the plaies. 

By the Kings Hallamas day being 

Ma"' plaiers. the first of Novembar, 

A play in the Banketinge 

House att Whithall 

called the Moor of 

Venis. [Nov. ist, 1604.] 

By his Ma"* The Sunday ffollowinge, 

plaiers. A Play of the Merry W^ives 

of Winsor. [Nov. 4th, 1604,] 



142 



MEMOIRS OF 



On the 5 th of June, 1607, Susanna Shakespeare, 
who was her father's favorite daughter, and who 
seems to have been a superior woman, was mar- 
ried to Dr. John Hall, a physician of good repute 
in his county. On the 31st of December of the 
same year, Edmund Shakespeare was buried in 
the parish of St. Saviour's, Southwark. He was 



TJie Platers. 

By his Ma*'« 
plaiers. 



By his Ma*'« 
plaiers. 

By his Ma*^' 
plaiers. 

By his Ma*^^ 
plaiers. 

By his Ma*'^ 
plaiers. 

By his Ma*'^ 
plaiers. 



The Poets which 
jnayd the plaies. 

On St. Stivens night in Shaxberd. 

the Hall a Play called 

Mesur for Mesur. [Dec. 26th, 1604.] 

On Inosents Night The Plaie Shaxberd. 
of Errors. [Dec. 28th, 1604.] 

Betwin Newers day and 
Twelfe day a Play of Loves 
Labours Lost. [1605.] 

On the 7 of January was played 
the play of Henry the 
fift. [1605.] 

On Shrovsunday A play of Shaxberd. 

the Marchant of Venis. 
[Mar. 24th, 1605.] 

On Shrovtusday A Play Shaxberd. 

cauled the Merchant of 

Venis againe commaunded 

by the Kings Ma*^'. [Mar. 26, 1605.] 



[Accounts from Oct. 31st, 161 1, to Nov. ist, 1612.] 



By the Kings 


Hallomas nyght was 


players. 


presented att Whithall 




before y^ Kinges Ma*'" 




a play called the Tempest. 




[Nov. 1st, 161 1.] 


The Kings 


The 5th of November : A 


players. 


play called y« winters 




nightes Tayle. [161 1.] 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



143 



a player of no distinction, who probably had fol- 
lowed his brother to London and obtained a place 
in the Black-friars company by his influence. 

The inducements presented to Shakespeare by 
his Puritan townsman Sturley, as early as the 
year 1597, to the purchase of tithes in his native 
place, were insufficient at the time, or he had not 
the needful money at hand ; for he then acquired 
no interest in them. But he seems to have enter- 
tained the project favorably, and to have formed 
the design of making an investment of this kind ; 
for in 1605 he bought the moiety of a lease, 
granted in 1544, of all the tithes of Stratford, 
Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe ; for 
which he paid down in cash ;^440. This is the 
most important purchase he is known to have 
made. The consideration was equal to between 
eleven and twelve thousand dollars of our money. 

The natural desire of transmitting an honora- 
ble name and a fair estate to descendants seems 
to have been strong in Shakespeare, and his 
hopes, sadly disappointed by the early death of 
his only son, must have been a little dashed again 
by the event which made him first a grandfather, 
— the birth, in February, 1607-8, of a daughter to 
his daughter Susanna, the wife of Dr. Hall. She 
brought her husband no other children. In Sep- 
tember following Mary Arden died, having sur- 
vived her husband seven years. Shakespeare's 
mother must have been about seventy years old 



J 44 MEMOIRS OF 

at her death, which took place probably in the old 
home in Henley Street, to which she had gone 
fifty years before as John Shakespeare's wife, and 
where the son was born to whom she doubtless 
owed her undisturbed residence in that house of 
hope and of sad and tender memories. We do not 
know that he was present at her funeral ; and he 
seems to have set up no stone to tell us where she 
or his father lay. But the same is true with regard 
to his son Hamnet ; and it is reasonable to sup- 
pose that his own death prevented the completion 
of designs for a tomb for the family. The next 
month, October of this same year, 1608, affords 
us, though in the most formal and unsatisfactory 
manner, our nearest approximation to a record of 
a social gathering at which he was present. On 
the 1 6th, he was sponsor at the baptism of the 
son of Henry Walker, an alderman of Stratford. 
The boy was called after his godfather, who re- 
membered him in his will by a legacy of xx. s, 
in gold. So that, after all, as Shakespeare's 
mother's funeral took place on the 6th of the pre- 
vious month, we may be pretty sure that he per- 
formed for her the last offices, and that he was 
remaining at Stratford in temporary and much 
coveted seclusion when he was asked to be Wil- 
liam Walker's godfather. 

In 1605, when he was forty years old, he had 
produced his great tragedy, Kin^ Lear, the most 
admirable and wonderful work of human genius. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



145 



Of this drama the bookseller obtained a copy in 
1608, and in that year published three editions of 
it, the high reputation of its author, as well as the 
public admiration of this particular work, having 
been shown not only by the unusual demand which 
the bookseller was called upon to supply, but by 
the means which the latter took to make it clear 
upon the title-page that this was "Mr. William 
Shakespeare HIS Tragedy of King Lear." 

For anxious souls who are concerned upon the 
subject of Shakespeare's taxes, there is a comfort- 
able memorandum preserved at Dulwich College, 
which professes to give the names of all those 
who in April, 1609, were rated and assessed for a 
weekly payment toward the relief of the poor of 
the Clink Liberty in Southwark. Among fifty- 
seven names are those of Philip Henslow, Ed- 
ward Alleyn, and Mr. Shakespeare, who are each 
assessed weekly at vj. d. But, alas ! this invalua- 
ble evidence also is impeached as spurious ; and 
judging from the fac-simile of it which has been 
published, it is certainly but a clumsy, and some- 
times careless, imitation of seventeenth-century 
writing. But for this loss there is recompense in 
the authenticity of a court record, by which we 
know that in August, 1608, Shakespeare sued John 
Addenbroke of Stratford, got a judgment for £6, 
and £1 4^. costs, and that, Addenbroke being re- 
turned itojt est inveiittts, Shakespeare sued his bail, 
Thomas Hornby, the proceedings lasting until 
7 J 



I .5 MEMOIRS OF 

June, 1609. Four years before, Shakespeare had 
sued one Philip Rogers in the Stratford Court of 
Record for £1 15^. lod. He had sold Rogers malt 
to the value of ;^i 19^. lod., and had lent him 
2s., of which the debtor had paid but 6s. And 
so Shakespeare brought suit for what is called in 
trade the balance of the account, which repre- 
sented about $40 of our money. These stories 
grate upon our feelings with a discord as much 
harsher than that which disturbs us when we 
hear of Addison suing poor Steele for ^100, as 
Shakespeare lives in our hearts the lovelier as 
well as the greater man than Addison. But Ad- 
dison's case was aggravated by the fact that the 
debtor was his long-time friend and fellow-laborer. 
Debts are to be paid, and rogues who can pay 
and will not pay must be made to pay ; but the 
pursuit of an impoverished man, for the sake of 
imprisoning him and depriving him both of the 
power of paying his debt and supporting himself 
and his family, is an incident in Shakespeare's life 
which it requires the utmost allowance and con- 
sideration for the practice of the time and. country 
to enable us to contemplate with equanimity, — 
satisfaction is impossible. 

The biographer of Shakespeare must record 
these facts, because the literary antiquaries have 
unearthed and brought them forward as " new par- 
ticulars of the life of Shakespeare." We hunger, 
and we receive these husks ; we open our mouths 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. j^y 

for food, and we break our teeth against these 
stones. What have these law-papers, in the in- 
volved verbiage of which dead quarrels lie em- 
balmed, in hideous and grotesque semblance of 
their living shapes, their life-blood dried that lent 
them all their little dignity, their action, and their 
glow, exhaling only a faint and sickly odor of the 
venom that has kept them from decay, — what 
have these to do with the life of him whom his 
friends delighted to call sweet and gentle ? Could 
not these, at least, have been allowed to rest ? 
The parties to them have been two centuries 
in their graves. Why awake from slumber the 
empty echoes of their living strife ? 

It is almost as remote from the purpose of true 
biography, though it is somewhat more satisfac- 
tory, to ascertain the amount of the income which 
Shakespeare so laboriously acquired and so jeal- 
ously guarded. That the basis of a calculation 
might not be lacking, the indefatigable (and ever 
successful) Mr. Collier produced from the manu- 
scripts at Bridgewater House a memorandum 
which professes to state the value of Shake- 
speare's property in the Black-friars. The reader 
will remember the fruitless opposition of the Lord 
Mayor and Aldermen of London to the establish- 
ment of this theatre. Neither their animosity 
nor their efforts ceased with their first failure. 
They neglected no opportunity, no means, to at- 
tain their end. Finally, in 1608, Sir Henry Mon- 



148 



MEMOIRS OF 



tagu, the then Attorney-General, gave an opinion 
that the jurisdiction of the corporation of London 
extended over the Liberty of the Black-friars, and 
there was another attempt to dislodge Richard 
Burbadge, William Shakespeare, and their fellows. 
Either through lack of title or of influence, it was 
in vain. The players could not be ousted. Then, 
if we could accept the evidence of Mr. Collier's 
document, the Mayor and Aldermen thought of 
buying out the men whom they could not turn 
out, and had an estimate made of the value of the 
Black-friars theatrical property, which proved to 
be in the bulk worth ;^7,ooo, of which sum Shake- 
speare's shares and wardrobe property absorbed 
;^ 1,43 3 ^^- ^^- According to this memorandum 
Shakespeare's income from his four shares was 
;;^I33 6s. d)d.; the rent of a wardrobe and proper- 
ties set down as worth ;^500 could not have been 
less than ;^50 ; which makes the Black-friars in- 
come £i^2> ^^' 8^. Reckoning a like return from 
the Globe, we have £'^66 135-. ^d.; and remem- 
bering that Shakespeare had other property, and 
also a productive pen, Mr. Collier, whose calcu- 
lation this is, certainly rather underrates than 
overrates his income at ;^400 — equal to about 
^10,000 now — yearly. But alas ! this paper, like 
so many others brought to light by the same hand, 
and like the professed Southampton letter which 
refers to the same circumstances, has been pro- 
nounced spurious by high, though perhaps not 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



149 



infallible, authority.* Yet the conclusions based 
upon it are sustained by a letter of unquestioned 

* The following is a copy of the memorandum in question. 
It has been pronounced spurious by Sir Frederic Madden, Mr. 
T. Duffus Hardy, Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, Professor Brewer 
(as to whose official positions see the note on p. 107), Mr. Richard 
Giardner, M. W. B. D. D. Turnbull, and Mr. Halliwell. 

" For avoiding of the playhouse in the Blacke Friers. 
Impr Richard Burbidge owith the Fee and is alsoe \ 

a sharer therein. His interest he rateth at/ y e. qa 

the grosse summe of loooli for the Fee and I ^^^ 
for his foure Shares the summe of 93311 6s 8d ; 
Ite77t Laz Fletcher owith three shares w'^'' he rateth \ 

at 7ooli that is at 7 years purchase for eche > 700 li • 
share or 3311 6s 8d one year with an other. ; 
Ikm W. Shakspeare asketh for the wardrobe and ^ 

properties of the same playhouse 5ooli, and f y (^ 9a 

for his 4 shares, the same as his fellowes ( 
Burbidge and Fletcher 933li 6s 8d ) 

Item Heminges and Condell eche 2 shares 933 li 6s 8d 

Item Joseph Taylor one share and an halfe 350 li 

Itetn Lowing one share and an halfe 350 li 

Item foure more playeres with one halfe share ) ,,.. , 

unto eche of them ) ^ 

Suma totalis 6166. 13. 4. 
Moreover, the hired men of the Companie de- ' 
maund some recompence for their greate losse 
and the Widowes and Orphanes of players who 
are paide by the Sharers at diuers rates & propor- 
cons soe as in the whole it will coste the Lo. 
Mayor and Citizens at the least 

Here may conveniently be added another document from the 
same source, which rests under even graver imputations against 
its genuineness. It professes to be a draft or abridged tran- 
script of a warrant, appointing Robert Daiborne, William Shake- 
speare, and others, instructors of the Children of the Queen's 
Revels. But aside from the palasographic condemnation of the 
paper, its contents have been shown by Mr. Halliwell (in his 



► 7000 li " 



ISO 



MEMOIRS OF 



authenticity in the State Paper Office at London. 
Mr. John Chamberlain, writing to Sir Dudley 

Curiosities of Shakespearian Criticisiji, p. 22) to be entirely incon- 
gruous with the circumstances under which it professes to have 
been written. 

" Right trusty and welbeloved, &c., James, &c. To all Mayors, 
Sheriffs, Justices of the Peace, &c. Whereas the Queene, our 
dearest wife, hath for her pleasure and recreation appointed her 
servaunts Robert Daiborne, &c. to provide and bring upp a con- 
venient nomber of children, who shall be called the Children of 
her Majesties Revells, knowe ye that we have appointed and au- 
thorized, and by these presents doe appoint and authorize the 
said Robert Daiborne, William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Field, 
and Edward Kirkham, from time to time to provide and bring 
upp a convenient nomber of children, and them to instruct and 
exercise in the quality of playing Tragedies, Comedies, &c., by 
the name of the Children of the Revells to the Queene, within 
the Blackfryers, in our Citie of London, or els where within our 
realme of England. Wherefore we will and command you, and 
everie of you, to permitt her said servaunts to keepe a conven- 
ient nomber of children, by the name of the Children of the 
Revells to the Queene, and them to exercise in the qualitie of 
playing according to her royal pleasure. Provided alwaies, that 
no playes, &c. shall be by them presented, but such playes, &c. 
as have received the approbation and allowance of our Maister 
of the Revells for the tyme being. And these our Ires, shall be 
your sufficient warrant in this behalfe. In witnesse whereof, &c., 
4° die Janij. 1609. 

Bl Fr and globe 

Wh Fr and parish garden 

Curten and fortune 



All in & neere London 



Hope and Swanne 

*' Proud povertie. Engl tragedie. 

Widow's mite. False Friendes. 

Antonio kinsmen. Hate and love. 

Triumph of Truth. Taming of S. 

Touchstone. K. Edw 2. 
Grissell. Stayed." 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



151 



Carleton at the Hague in 161 9, mentions that the 
death of the Queen hinders the players from the 
exercise of their caUing, and adds, " One speciale 
man among them, Burbadge, is lately dead, and 
hath left, they say, better than ;^300 land." Now, 
if Burbadge, who was but an actor, could acquire 
landed property to the value of ^300 yearly, sure- 
ly Shakespeare might well receive ;^ioo more 
from all his sources of income. A chancery suit 
upon which Shakespeare was obliged to enter, 
apparently in 161 2, for the protection of his in- 
terests in the tithes of Stratford and neighboring 
parishes, shows us that his receipts from that 
quarter were £60 (now full i^isoo) yearly.* To 

I here remark upon a hitherto unnoticed but very significant 
and suspicious fact in connection with this paper, and one of a 
very unpleasant nature for Mr. Collier. It will be observed that 
the list of plays which follows the essential part of the paper, and 
which is followed by the memorandum " Stayed," ends with " K. 
Edw 2." According to the fac-simile made by a fac-similist of 
high repute in London, this list is in a single column, and be- 
tween the title of the last play and the word '* Stayed " there is a 
blank space about two inches wide. Now, in the copy of this 
paper given in Mr. Collier's Life of Shakespeare (p. ccxxix.) 
" K. Edw 2 " is followed by the name of another play, " Mirror 
of Life." Whence did Mr. Collier derive the name of that play, 
which does not exist upon the document itself as it appears in 
the Bridgewater MSS. ? From a draft firom which the Bridge- 
water MS. was written out? How else ? For it must be noted 
that this is not an instance of error in reading or copying, but an 
absolute interpolation. See the Southampton letter above re- 
ferred to, on pp. 107, 108 of this volume. 

* The Bill, which maybe found at full length in Mr. Halliwell's 
Life of Shakespeare, furnishes the following single paragraph of 
interest : — 



152 



MEMOIRS OF 



finish all that need be said about mere business 
transactions, in March, 1 612-3, Shakespeare, in 
connection with " William Johnson citizein and 
vintner of London and John Jackson and John 
Hemynge gentlemen," purchased from " Henry 
Walker citizein and minstrell" a house and the 
land attached, not far from the Black-friars thea- 
tre ; paying for it ;^I40, of which £60 were left 
on bond and mortgage. Mr. CoUier has reasona- 
bly conjectured that Shakespeare joined in this 
purchase to serve his fellow-actor, Heminge ; and 
that, Heminge and the two other purchasers not 
being able to discharge the amount which he 
had paid and assume the mortgage, the property 
fell to him. The deed of conveyance has a pecu- 
liar interest as bearing one of the four certainly 
authentic signatures of Shakespeare. It is now 
preserved in the library of the city of London, at 
Guildhall. 

Shakespeare had been about eighteen years in 
London, and with the approach of his fortieth 
year was attaining the height of his reputation, 
when a club was established there, which owes a 

*'.... and your oratour William Schackspeare hath an estate 
and interest of and in the moyty or one half of all tythes of corne 
and grayne aryseing within the townes, villages and ffields, and 
of and in the moity or half of all tythes of wool and lambs, and 
of all small and privy tythes, oblacions and alterages arisinge or 
increasing in Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcome, being in 
the said parishe of Stratford, or within the wholl parishe of Strat- 
ford uppon Avon aforesaid, for and during all the residue of the 
said terme, beinge of the yearly value of threescore pounds." 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. jq^ 

wide celebrity and perpetual fame chiefly to him, 
although there is no evidence that he was one of 
its members. It was founded by Sir Walter Ra- 
leigh, and met at the Mermaid, — a favorite tav- 
ern in Bread Street. Here Raleigh himself, Jon- 
son, Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden, Colton, Carew, 
Donne, and others their chosen companions, met 
for social and convivial enjoyment ; and that they 
did not admit Will Shakespeare of their crew, 
who can believe ? Yet our confidence that he sat 
with them round that board which Beaumont cel- 
ebrates in his well-known lines,* can only rest 
upon the moral impossibility that he should have 
been absent. There all students of the literature 
and manners of those days have reasonably agreed 
in placing the scene of the wit combats between 
Shakespeare and Jonson, the fame of which had 
reached Fuller's time, and caused him to imagine 

* " What things have we seen 
Done at the Mermaid ! heard words that have been 
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame, 
As if that every one from whom they came 
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 
And had resolv'd to live a fool the rest 
Of his dull life ; then when there hath been thrown 
Wit able enough to justify the town 
For three days past, wit that might warrant be 
For the whole city to talk foolishly 
Till that were cancell'd, and, wJien that was gone, 
We left an air behind us which alone 
Was able to make the two next companies 
Right witty, though but downright fools, more wise." 

Letter to Ben Jonson, 



1^4 MEMOIRS OF 

the encounter of the two like that between a 
Spanish great galleon and an English man-of- 
war ; Jonson, like the former, built far higher in 
learning, and solid, but slow in his performances ; 
Shakespeare, like the latter, less in bulk, but 
lighter in movement, turning and tacking nimbly, 
and taking every advantage by the quickness of 
his wit and invention. This, however is only Ful- 
ler's imagination. We have no testimony as to 
the quality or the style of wit exhibited by either 
of these redoubted combatants ; and all the pre- 
tended specimens of their colloquial jests and 
repartees that have reached us are so pitiably 
tame and forced, that they are plainly foolish fab- 
rications. 

We all are sure that Shakespeare must have 
been one of this Mermaid club, because of his cer- 
tain acquaintance with some, and his very proba- 
ble acquaintance with all of its members, and be- 
cause of the qualifications which made him the 
most desirable of men as one of such a social 
circle. For he was not only a great poet, a suc- 
cessful playwright, and an influential man in his 
company, but, according to all accounts, a charm- 
ing companion. What, then, may we conclude, 
was Shakespeare's social life in London, while 
from earliest manhood to maturity he rose by his 
connection with literature and the drama from 
obscurity to the highest distinction attainable by 
those means in that day ? 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



155 



We have seen that at twenty-eight years of age 
he enjoyed the acquaintance and had won the re- 
spect of men very far above him in social position. 
It could not have been that his intercourse with 
that class of society was confined to casual meet- 
ings at the theatre and convivial gatherings at the 
tavern. Men of his gifts, rating him merely at 
contemporary estimation, are too rare in any so- 
ciety not to be welcomed if there are not special 
reasons for their exclusion. Nay, they sometimes 
make their way into the most fastidious circles, 
even when they are needy and debauched, or 
uncouth and domineering. And in the time of 
Queen Elizabeth such association was more open 
to them than it is in our day, from the very fact 
that then the grades of society were so distinctly 
marked, and the position of every man so exactly 
known, that there was no apprehension on the one 
part, or hope on the other, of any confusion of 
class and rank. Difference in social position and 
in occupation was then indicated unmistakably in 
the every-day dress and even the holiday costume 
of the wearer. Peasant, yeoman, artisan, trades- 
man, and gentleman could then be distinguished 
from each other almost as far as they could be 
seen. Except in cases of unusual audacity, neither 
presumed to wear the dress of his betters. But 
to these rigid and exclusive rules of demarcation 
the poets, and especially the players, were, in a 
certain degree, exceptions. Even in dress they 



156 



MEMOIRS OF 



assumed a license which was made the subject of 
remark and satire, and rustled through the streets 
in silks and satins, with swords and plumed hats, 
like noblemen. The reasons for this peculiarity 
were partly the fact that their intellectual culture 
gave them the taste, and in some degree a claim, 
to assume the habit and manners of the higher 
classes, partly because their ranks were in some 
measure recruited from those of the poorer gen- 
try, and partly also from the habit which the 
players at least (and many of the poets were play- 
ers)' acquired on the stage of bearing and dress- 
ing themselves like gentlemen. 

Belonging to the exceptional class, yet by na- 
ture not of it, Shakespeare was exceptional in it, 
and shared its privileges without contamination 
of its vulgar vices, and so without suffering all its 
disabilities. And beside, the very company of 
which he was a member enjoyed, and seems to 
have deserved, peculiar consideration. Authority 
nearly contemporary assures us that "all those 
companies got money and lived in reputation, es- 
pecially those of the Black-friars, who were men 
of grave and sober behavior." In this respect, as 
well as in all others, we may be sure that he was 
primus inter pares. We can see by the impression 
which he left upon his contemporaries, that to a 
native dignity of soul and gentleness of disposi- 
tion he united a courtesy of bearing that made 
him in fact the gentleman, to be acknowledged as 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



157 



which seems to have been his chief desire. In 
the phraseology of modern society, he was emi- 
nently presentable in any circle. Being such a 
man, being distinguished as he was, and having 
early won the personal esteem of influential no- 
blemen, it can hardly be but that he was received 
into the high and cultivated society of the metrop- 
olis. Once there, we may be sure he met with 
ladies who were more than willing that he should 
yield to that fascination of soul and sense which 
the personal and mental charms of beautiful and 
high-bred women exert upon men of sensitive or- 
ganization. What effect this experience must have 
had upon him, almost every man can measurably 
judge. We know how Robert Burns, that inspired 
peasant, was bewildered by a brief draught of like 
intoxication. But over Burns Shakespeare had 
not only the advantage of superior genius. Self- 
poised, reserved, instinct with tact (this is no more 
than inference, but inference which to me is moral 
certainty), he was no inspired peasant, and bore 
himself so unexceptionably that no woman, what- 
ever her rank or her refinement, who looked on 
him with favor, was put to shame by his weak- 
ness, his extravagance, or even his eccentricity. 
That there should be such women was inevitable. 
Tradition tells us that he went yearly to Stratford, 
where he left his wife and children. This may 
well have been. The interests which he looked 
after so carefully would be likely to take him into 



158 



MEMOIRS OF 



the society of his wife as often as once in a twelve- 
month. Tradition also tells us, that on his way 
back and forth on these dutiful journeys he used 
to stop in Oxford, at the Crown Tavern, which 
was kept by John Davenant, a grave and melan- 
choly citizen who had to wife a beautiful and 
charming woman. Sir William Davenant, who 
was born in February, 1605-6, was her son ; and 
Shakespeare, it is said, was his godfather. And 
the story goes that one day an old townsman, 
seeing Will running homeward in great haste 
"to see his godfather Shakespeare," told him to 
be careful lest he took God's name in vain. This 
may all be true ; but a story essentially the same 
is not uncommon in very old jest-books. Indeed, 
the humorous quibble is so apparent and so invit- 
ing, that, if the tale is not as old as the custom 
of having fathers, it is only because it cannot be 
older than that of having godfathers. Now Sir 
William Davenant gave countenance to this report 
of his origin ; but what credit shall be given to 
the testimony of a man who would welcome an 
aspersion upon his mother's reputation for the 
sake of being believed to write, by inheritance, 
" with the very spirit of Shakespeare," as he said 
he thought he did. Davenant was morally a poor 
creature, and in this he only did his kind. 

Another story is also told of Shakespeare's for- 
tunes with the sex. Having been long current as 
a tradition, it was afterwards found recorded in 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



159 



Manningham's diary among the Ashmolean MSS., 
under the date, March 13th, 1601. It is, that a 
woman, '' a citizen," seeing Richard Burbadge, the 
great actor of the day, play Richard III., was so 
carried away by her admiration that she asked 
him to visit her after the play, — an invitation to 
supper from ladies to favorite actors being then 
not uncommon. Shakespeare overheard the ap- 
pointment, (the custom of admitting spectators 
upon the stage during the performance must again 
be remembered,) and, resolving to supplant his 
friend, went to the rendezvous before him, an- 
nounced himself as the crook-backed tyrant, and 
was as successful as his own hero in winning fe- 
male favor under adverse circumstances. Bur- 
badge arrived soon after, and, sending word that 
Richard III. was at the door, received for answer, 
from a source as to which he could have had no 
doubt, that " William the Conqueror was before 
Richard III." 

But it was not by adventures of this kind that 
a soul like Shakespeare's could be satisfied ; nor 
was it under the influence of women of this sort 
that with the advance of years a striking change 
took place in the traits of his female characters. 
For it is remarkable that in his earliest plays, 
those written when his Stratford reminiscences 
were freshest, the women are the reverse of lova- 
ble and gentle. But after a few years of London 
life had widened his observation and mitigated his 



l6o MEMOIRS OF 

experience, there came such a change over his 
creatures of this kind, that it is praise enough of 
any, the fairest now and sweetest, to say she is 
like one of Shakespeare's women. Surely not to 
chance, and as surely to no evolution from the 
depths of moral consciousness, is due the differ- 
ence between the women in Henry the Sixth, The 
Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, and Loves 
Labor V Lost, and those in the later plays. Nor 
could it have been merely the fruit of maturing 
judgment. For very young men, and, most of all, 
very young poets, are sure to see women with the 
mind's eye only through the soft lustre of those 
charms which bewilder even the better instructed, 
though perhaps not wiser, apprehension of pro- 
saic age.* Shakespeare's mind, like Raphael's, 
furnished forth his own ideals ; but there can be 
no reasonable doubt that it was in the high-bred, 
cultivated women into whose society his noble and 
worshipful admirers took him that he found his 
female models.f From among these women did 

* I have always thought Kent's reply to Lear's inquiry as to his 
age a superlative touch of penetration. 

" Lear. How old art thou ? 

" Kent. Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing ; nor 
so old, to dote on her for anything : I have years on my back for- 
ty-eight." 

t During the slow progress of these Memoirs from manuscript 
into type Miss Bunnett's translation of Dr. Gervinus's voluminous 
Shakespeare Commentaries has reached me. In his comments 
upon Much Ado About N'othing he says : " We have before drawn 
attention to the fact, that in the plays belonging to Shakespeare's 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. l6l 

he go forth with heart unscathed ? Among them 
all, was there not one who felt that, although she 
perhaps was of noble birth, that player, though not 
her lord, was master of her heart ? Of the many 
courtly dames who then gave up all, even their 
good name, for men they loved, was there not one 
who knew the worth of Shakespeare ? He with 
a painter's eye for beauty, and a poet's soul of 
passion, who could read women's hearts as in a 
mirror, alive to all the charms of cultivated socie- 
ty, and illustrating them in his person, and with a 
rustic wife eight years older than himself away 
off in Stratford, — he with honey upon his tongue 
as well as in his pen, of such winning ways that 
men called him sweet, and gruff Ben Jonson's 
heart went out to him, — handsome and well- 
shaped too, — is it in man's nature, is it in wo- 
man's nature, that he should not have loved and 
been beloved in London ? Let only those who 

early period there is a remarkable preponderance of bad women : 
the poet's own experience appears at that time to have inspired 
him with no advantageous opinion of the female sex." After- 
ward Gervinus adds, speaking of the author's second period : 
" Shakes]Deare must at that time in London, in the wider circle of 
his acquaintance, in his contact with the liigher classes, have be- 
come intimate with women who withdrew him suddenly from his 
former ill humor with the sex, into a devoted admiration of 
them." (Vol. I. p. 588.) While I cannot but be gratified at the 
support which my views thus receive from the learned German 
philosopher, it is only just that I should say that they are not ap- 
propriated from him without acknowledgment ; they having been 
written out, and even partly put in type, long before his Shake 
speare Cmimentaries made their appearance. 



l52 MEMOIRS OF 

have thoughtfully read his sonnets answer. For 
whatever may have been the motives of those 
mysterious compositions, which alternately be- 
guile us with their seeming revelations of a sim- 
ple fact, and baffle us with the sudden presenta- 
tion of impossibility, there beats beneath their 
artificial surface a pulse of passion so profound, 
there comes from behind their impenetrable veil 
a cry of anguish so personal as well as so human, 
that reason seeks in vain to stifle the intuitive con- 
viction that in them we are face to face and eye to 
eye with the man Shakespeare, reading, though but 
vaguely comprehending, the inmost secrets of his 
heart. They may not be the record of his soul's 
experience, but they surely are its witness. They 
may possibly have been written for others, but 
they are of himself They lack entirely the dra- 
matic element, and tell an individual story ; and 
no such living, fleshly birth as they ever took life 
from another's joy, or was brought forth by vica- 
rious suflering. 

To what period of Shakespeare's life we are to 
assign these sonnets cannot be decided. He had 
written some sonnets before 1598, because' in that 
year Meres mentions certain "sugared sonnets 
among his private friends." But were they these } 
These tell of a dear, a trusted, and a faithless 
friend, of a mistress loved in spite of reason and 
in the teeth of conviction. Are these the sort of 
literary exercises that Shakespeare would be likely 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



163 



to hand around among his curious, criticising 
friends ? Or if they revealed the secrets of an- 
other's heart, would he be inclined to have them 
submitted to such publicity ? The date of their 
publication makes it certain that these sonnets 
were all written before Shakespeare was forty-five 
years old ; and they probably were produced be- 
tween his thirtieth and his fortieth year. Thomas 
Thorpe's dedication tells us absolutely nothing of 
their origin ; only that there was a secret about 
it that has never been revealed. Could either 
of those other persons whom they concern have 
become so reduced as to make merchandise of 
them, or have been so small-souled as to seek 
notoriety through their publication t Sadder, 
stranger things have happened. The mystery of 
these sonnets will never be unfolded ; yet in an 
attempt to trace the course of Shakespeare's life 
they cannot be passed by, although they tell us 
nothing surely, except that they express the in- 
most thoughts and feelings of one who, however 
wise and prudent he might have been, was in 
his affections and his passions little more self- 
restrained than David, little less wise than Sol- 
omon. 



1 64 



MEMOIRS OF 



V. 



We are as ignorant, upon direct evidence, of 
the exact date at which Shakespeare at last with- 
drew from London to live at ease in Stratford, 
as we are of that at which he fled from Stratford 
to enter upon a life of irksome toil in London. 
But all circumstances which bear upon this ques- 
tion point to some time in the year 1611. He 
retired from active life a wealthier man than he 
could reasonably have hoped to become when hc' 
entered it. He had achieved a fame and attained 
a social standing which must have been very far 
beyond his expectations ; and he had won the fa- 
vor and enjoyed the society of men of high rank 
and great public distinction. But yet even to 
William Shakespeare, with his surpassing genius, 
his worldly wisdom, his prudence and his thrift, 
all culminating in a success which made him the 
mark of envy at the end, as he had been at 
the beginning of his career, life was unsatisfy- 
ing.* He returned to Stratford a disappointed 
man. 

* The following passage in a tract called RatseVs Ghost, or the 
Second Part of his Mad Prankes and Robberies, of which only one 
copy is known to exist, plainly refers, first to Burbadge and next 
to Shakespeare. The book is without date, but is believed to 
have been printed before 1606. Gamaliel Ratsey, who speaks, is 
a highwayman who has paid some strollers 40^-. for playing before 
him, and afterward robbed them of their fee. The author was 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



165 



Circumstances not pleasant, we may be sure, 
had limited his family to three children born at 
two births before he was of age, and heaviest 
among his household sorrows was the loss of the 
only boy his wife had brought him. He had no 
son to bear his name, to inherit his property, to 
glory in his fame, and to be the third gentleman 
of his family. His daughters, rustic born and 
rustic bred, were not fitted for circles in which 
they might otherwise have been sought as wives 
by men of the position to which their father had 
raised himself He saw them married rather late 

probably some inferior player or playwright to whom Shake- 
speare had been chary of his money or his companionship. 

" And for you, sirrah, (says he to the chiefest of them,) thou 
hast a good presence upon a stage, methinks thou darkenst thy 
merit by playing in the country : get thee to London, for if one 
man were dead, they will have much need of such as thou art. 
There would be none, in my opinion, fitter than thyself to play 
his parts : my conceit is such of thee, that I durst all the money 
in my purse on thy head to play Hamlet with him for a wager. 
There thou shalt learne to be frugal (for players were never so 
thrifty as they are now about London), and to feed upon all men; 
to let none feed upon thee ; to make thy hand a stranger to thy 
pocket, thy heart slow to perform thy tongue's promise ; and 
when thou feelest thy purse well lined, buy thee some place of 
lordship in the country ; that, growing weary of playing, thy 
money may there bring thee to dignity and reputation : then thou 
needest care for no man ; no, not for them that before made thee 
proud with speaking their [thy] words on the stage. Sir, I thank 
you (quoth the player) for this good council : I promise you I 
will make use of it, for I have heard, indeed, of some that have 
gone to London very meanly, and have come in time to be ex- 
ceeding wealthy." 



1 56 MEMOIRS OF 

in life to simple village folk, and he resigned him- 
self to simple village society, — wisely, perhaps, 
but yet, we may be sure, not without a pang and 
that sense of wrong which afflicts so many of us 
at the unequal and incongruous distribution of 
means and opportunities. It must have been 
with bitterness of soul that he saw the disappear- 
ance of his hopes of being the head of a family 
ranking among the gentry of England. 

Rowe says that the latter part of his life was 
spent, as all men of good sense will wish theirs 
may be, in ease, retirement, and the conversation 
(i. e. the society, the intercourse) of his friends. 
He adds, that " his pleasurable wit and good na- 
ture engaged him in the acquaintance and enti- 
tled him to the friendship of the gentlemen of the 
neighborhood." And Mr. Fullom tells us that 
the Lucys have lately discovered that his quarrel 
with their family was made up, and that he lived 
on pleasant terms with Sir Thomas, the son of his 
ancient enemy.* But this story, though not very 
improbable, rests on vague and untrustworthy 
evidence. William Shakespeare, retired from the 
stage, and living in a fine mansion, upon a hand- 
some fortune, in his native town, seems to us a 
man whose acquaintance might well have been 
courted by the gentlemen of the neighborhood. 
But we must remember the social canons and 
the class limitations of his time, and take also 

* Fullom's History of William Shakespeare, p. 314. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



167 



into consideration that, when he abandoned au- 
thorship and the theatre, he divided the ties 
which had bound him not only to a profession 
which he disHked, but to a social circle into which 
that profession had introduced him. Thereafter 
his personal relations and social position depend- 
ed merely upon his personal character and his 
social importance ; and he inevitably fell into the 
place which could be filled by one who, although 
a pleasant companion, a poet of reputation, and a 
highly respectable, prudent man, was yet barely 
within the nominal pale of gentry ; and who yet, 
being within it, could not be treated as a yeoman. 
William Shakespeare the great play-writer and 
poet, omnipotent at the Black -friars and the 
Globe, and living a bachelor's life in London, 
was socially a very different person from William 
Shakespeare the retired actor, assuming the posi- 
tion of a gentleman, and living at Stratford with 
his rustic wife and daughters. To the gentlemen 
of the county round he was merely one of the 
newest sort of new men. And although, from 
what we know of his business affairs, it is proba- 
ble that on his retirement to Stratford he sold all 
his theatrical property, and withdrew from any 
connection with the theatre, except such as con- 
sisted in the writing of two or three plays, yet it 
cannot have been that, in a community so per- 
vaded with the leaven of Puritanism as Warwick- 
shire around Stratford was, and where, as we 



l58 MEMOIRS OF 

have already seen, in 1602, and again in 1612, the 
most stringent measures were taken by the cor- 
poration of the town to prevent the performance 
of any plays, the profession which had brought 
Shakespeare his wealth and his eminence did not 
tell against his social advancement, except among 
the liberal and generous-minded few. Again T 
remark, that it is to this prejudice and to Shake- 
speare's desire to stand with the world as a gen- 
tleman of substance and character, and not as an 
actor and playwright, that we must attribute his 
neglect of his dramas after they had discharged 
their double function of filling his pockets and 
giving his brain employment and his soul expres- 
sion. Indifference to the literary fate of their 
works was common among the playwrights of 
that day ; but to this custom was added, in Shake- 
speare's case, a motive. The Reverend John 
Ward, who was made Vicar of Stratford in 1662, 
records a tradition that Shakespeare in his retire- 
ment supplied the stage with two plays every 
year, and lived at the rate of i^iooo. This is 
.quite surely but a gross exaggeration of the facts, 
both as to the rate of his expenditure and the 
amount of his dramatic labor. We have seen that 
his income was about ;^400, though it was rather 
over than under that then handsome sum ; and 
only three of his plays. The Tempest, The Winters 
Tale, and Henry the Eighth, were produced after 
his retirement to Stratford. The last of these 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



169 



was brought out at the Globe Theatre, as a spec- 
tacle piece, on the 29th of June, 161 3 ; and dur- 
ing its performance the theatre took fire from 
the discharge of the chambers during one of the 
pageants, and was burned to the ground. It is an 
interesting coincidence, that the first performance 
of the last play that came from Shakespeare's 
pen was the occasion of the destruction of that 
" wooden O " in which he had won so many of his 
imperishable laurels. 

Shakespeare is said to have put his poetical 
powers to use during his later Stratford years in 
writing epitaphs for friends and neighbors. Such 
an employment of his pen would have been natu- 
ral. The following verses upon the tomb of Sir 
Thomas Stanley in Tonge Church are attributed 
to him by Dugdale in his Histoiy of Wmuuickshire. 
It is possible that he wrote epitaphs no better. 

" Written upon the east eitd of the Tomb. 

" Ask who lies here, but do not weep ; 
He is not dead, he doth but sleep. 
This stony register is for his bones ; 
His fame is more perpetual than these stones : 
And his own goodness, with himself being gone, 
Shall live when earthly monument is none. 

" Written on the west end thereof. 
" Not monumental stone preserves our fame. 
Nor sky-aspiring pyramids our name. 
The memory of him for whom this stands 
Shall outlive marble and defacer's hands. 
When all to time's consumption shall be given, 
Stanley, for whom this stands, shall stand in heaven." 
8 



I/O 



MEMOIRS OF 



Rowe tells us of a tradition that John a Combe, 
of whose residence and habits something has 
been said in the earlier part of these memoirs, 
told Shakespeare laughingly, at a sociable gather- 
ing, that he fancied he meant to write his epitaph 
if he happened to outlive him, and begged the 
poet to perform his task immediately. Upon 
which Shakespeare gave him these now well- 
known verses : — 

" Ten in the hundred lies here in-grav'd ; 
'Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not sav'd : 
If any man ask, Who lies in this tomb ? 
Oh ho, quoth the Devil, 'tis my John a Combe." 

Much the same story had reached Aubrey's ears, 
and was of course duly recorded. But according 
to Aubrey the epitaph was written at a tavern on 
occasion of the funeral of its subject, and was in 
these words : — 

*' Ten in the hundred the Devil allows, 
But Combe will have twelve, he swears and he vows. 
If any one ask, Who lies in this tomb ? 
Ho ! quoth the Devil, 'tis my John a Combe." 

Rowe says that the sharpness of the satire so 
stung the man that he never forgave it. This, at 
least, is untrue. Shakespeare and his wealthier 
neighbor of Stratford College were good friends 
to the end of the latter's life. John a Combe's 
will is extant, and in it Shakespeare is remem- 
bered by a bequest of five pounds, and Shake- 
speare himself left his sword to Thomas, John 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



171 



a Combe's nephew. It must be remembered that 
in those times all interest was called usury, i. e. 
money paid for the use of money, and John a 
Combe's will is that of a man of true benevolence 
and mindful friendship. He forgives debts, makes 
wide and generous provision for the poor, and re- 
members with much particularity a large circle of 
friends among the knights, esquires, and gentle- 
men of his neighborhood.* This jest, turning 
upon ten in the hundred (the usual interest at that 
time), and a hundred to ten in favor of the Devil, 
was an old and a common one among our fore- 
fathers ; and consequently it has been generally 
supposed that this epitaph is a fabrication which 
was foisted upon Shakespeare. But I am inclined 
to think that he did crack this innocent joke upon 
his friend, using, as he would be likely to use, an 

* Mr. Halliwell discovered among the Ashmolean MSS. one 
"written," as he says, "not many years after the death of Shake- 
speare," in which this version of the above anecdote appears : — 

" On John Combe, a covetous rich man, Mr. Wm. Shak-spear zvright 
this att his request while hee was yett liveingfor his epitaphe. 
" Who lies in this tombe ? 
Hough, quoth the devil, tis my sone John a Combe. 

jFinis. 

" But being dead and making the poor his heires, hee after wrightes 
this for his epitaph. 
" Howere he lived judge not, 
John Combe shall never be forgott 
While poore hath memmorye, for he did gather 
To make the poore his issue : he their father, 
As record of his tilth and seedes. 
Did crowne him in his later needes. 

Finis. W. Shak:' 



j>72 MEMOIRS OF 

old, well-known jest, and giving it a new turn upon 
the money-lender's name. For Shakespeare was 
not always writing Hamlet. "'Tis my John a 
Combe" involves of course the sharp punning 
jest, 'tis my John ha' come* 

A project for the enclosing of some common 
lands near Stratford brings Shakespeare forward 
in 1614 as a man of weight and consideration in 
his neighborhood. It touched his interests in his 
own acres and in his tithes so closely, that he said 
to one of the numerous Greenes of Stratford, that 
" he was not able to bear the enclosing of Wel- 
combe." His kinsman Greene, the attorney, who 
was clerk of Stratford, records in his note-book 
this almost the only speech of Shakespeare which 
has been authoritatively handed down to us. 
Shakespeare took all possible measures to secure 
his threatened interests ; and there exists an agree- 
ment between him and William Replingham, who 
appears to have been one of the movers in the 
affair, by v/hich the latter agrees to make good 
any damage which the former may receive by the 
proposed enclosure.! The corporation of Strat- 

* Mr. Hunter says that the verses are " allusive to the double 
sense of the word Combe, as the name of the person there in- 
terred, and also the name of a certain measure of corn " ; and 
this explanation has been hitherto accepted. What point is there 
in likening John a Combe to a measure of corn ? 

t " Coppy of the articles with Mr. Shakspeare. 

" Vicesimo octavo die Octobris, anno Domini 1614. Articles 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



173 



ford were also opposed to this measure, alleging 
that it would press heavily upon the poorer class- 
es, already distressed by a destructive fire which 

of agreement made [and] indented between William Shacke- 
speare of Stretforde in the County of Warwick gent, on the one 
partye, and William Replingham of Great Harborow in the Coun- 
ty of Warwick gent, on the other partie, the daye and yeare above 
said. 

^^ Item, the said William Replingham for him, his heires, exec- 
utors and assignes, doth covenaunte and agree to and with the 
saide William Shackspeare his heires and assignes, That he, the 
said William Replingham, his heires or assignes, shall uppon rea- 
sonable request, satisfie, content, and make recompense unto him 
the said William Shackespeare or his assignes, for all such losse, 
detriment, and hinderance as he the said William Shackespeare, his 
heirs and assignes, and one Thomas Greene gent, shall or maye 
be thought in the viewe and judgement of foure indifferent per- 
sons, to be indifferentlie elected by the said William and William 
and their heires, and in default of the said William Replingham, 
by the said William Shackespeare or his heires onely, to survey 
and judge the same to sustayne or incurre for or in respecte of 
the increasinge of the yearlie value of the tythes they the said 
William Shackespeare and Thomas doe joyntlie or severallie hold 
and enjoy in the said fieldes or anie of them, by reason of anie 
inclosure or decaye of tyllage there ment and intended by the 
said William Replingham ; and that the said William Repling- 
ham and his heirs shall procure such sufficient securitie unto the 
said William Shackespeare and his heires for the performance 
of theis covenauntes, as shall bee devised by learned counsell. 
In witnes whereof the parties abovsaid to theis presentes inter- 
changeablie their handes and scales have put, the day^ and yeare 
first above wrytten. 

" Sealed and delivered in the presence of us, 

"Tho. Lucas, 
Jo. Rogers, 
Anthonie Nasshe, 
Mich. Olney." 



174 



MEMOIRS OF 



took place in that town in 1613, but which seems 
to have left Shakespeare's property untouched. 
In the autumn of 1614, Thomas Greene was in 
London about this business ; and by one of his 
memorandums we know that Shakespeare arrived 
there on the i6th of November of that year, prob- 
ably upon the same errand. Greene's memoran- 
dums show that he was in constant communica- 
tion with his " cosen Shakespeare " upon this sub- 
ject, and that the corporation counted much upon 
their distinguished townsman's influence in the 
matter.* He remained in London until after the 
23d of December in that year. From the same 
authority we hear of him in the negotiations of 
161 5, with regard to the same affair, which was 
not settled until 161 8 ; and this testimony as to 
his thrift and his care for his material interests is 
the last known contemporary record of the life of 
the great poet of all time. 

* " 1614. Jovis, 17 No. My cosen Shakspear comyng yes- 
terdy to Town, I went to see him how he did. He told me that 
they assured him they ment to inclose no further than to Gospell 
Bush, and so upp straight (leavying out part of the Dyngles to 
the ffield) to the gate in Clopton hedg, and take in Salisburyes 
peece ; and that they mean in Aprill to survey the land, and then 
to gyve satisfaccion, and not before ; and he and Mr. Hall say 
they think ther will be nothyng done at all." 

" 23. Dec, A hall. Lettres wrytten, one to Mr. Man)nring, 
another to Mr. Shakspear, with almost all the company's hands 
to eyther. I also wrytte myself to my cosen Shakspear the cop- 
pyes of all our acts, and then also a not of the inconvenyences 
wold happen by the inclosure." 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



175 



His younger daughter, Judith, was married on 
the nth of February, 1615-6, to Thomas Quiney, 
a vintner of Stratford, and son of the Thomas 
Quiney who in 1598 had asked Shakespeare to 
lend him ^^30. On the 25 th of the following 
March he executed his will, which an erased date 
shows that he had intended executing on the 25th 
of the preceding January ; and on the 23d of 
April, 1 6 16, William Shakespeare, of Stratford 
on Avon, in the county of Warwick, Gentleman, 
died. 

Of the cause of his death we only know what 
Vicar Ward aforesaid heard and noted down half 
a century after the event. His account is : 
" Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a 
merrie meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for 
Shakespeare died of a feavour ther contracted." 
We shrink from the thought of such a close of 
Shakespeare's life. But looking back upon the 
manners of the time, and considering its convivial 
habits, and the inordinate quantities of wine and 
strong ale then drunk by all who could procure 
them, we must admit that to die of fever after 
festivity might have been the fate of any man 
Men now living can remember when no person 
entered a house, at any time, the family of which 
were not very poor, without being offered and ex- 
pected to drink some spirituous liquor ; cake and 
wine having been brought forward even to our 
mothers at morning calls. And Spence tells us 



176 



MEMOIRS OF 



in his Anecdotes, on the authority of Pope, that 
Cowley the poet died as Ward says Shakespeare 
died, but from potations in more reverend, though 
perhaps not more worshipful company. He and 
Dean Sprat, afterward Bishop of Rochester, "had 
been together," Spence says, "to see a neighbor 
of Cowley's, who (according to the fashion of 
those times) made them too welcome. They did 
not set out for their walk home until it was too 
late, and had drunk so deep that they lay out in 
the fields all night. This gave Cowley the fever 
that carried him off. The parish still talk of the 
drunken Dean." And in the Chamberlain's ac- 
counts of Stratford, among the frequent charges 
for sack and sugar, claret, and beer, for such wor- 
shipful folk as Sir Fulke Greville and Sir Thomas 
Lucy, and even Lady Lucy, is one in 16 14 for 
"on quart of sack and on quart of clarett wine 
geven to a preacher at the New Place," Shake- 
speare's own house. These considerations make 
the alleged excess at such a merry meeting of 
poets as that recorded in Ward's diary a venial 
sin, and the sad consequences, though uncertain, 
not improbable. 

Shakespeare's remains were interred the sec- 
ond day after his death, the 25 th of April, in 
Stratford church, just before the chancel rail. 
Above his grave, on the north wall of the church, 
a monument was erected, at what exact date we 
do not know ; but it was before 1623, as it is 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 77 

mentioned by Leonard Digges in his verses pre- 
fixed to the first foUo edition of Shakespeare's 
plays. The monument shows a bust of the poet 
in the act of writing. Upon a tablet below the 
bust is the following inscription : — 

JuDicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem, 
Terra tegit, populus maeret, Olympus habet. 

Stay Passenger, why goest thou by so fast, 
Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath plast 
Within this monument, Shakespeare, with whome 
Quick nature dide ; whose name doth deck ys tombe 
Far more then cost ; sith all yt he hath writt 
Leaves living art but page to serve his witt. 

Obiit ano. dol 1616. aetatis 53. die 23 AP. 

The last line of this inscription, and a tradition 
unheard of until Oldys wrote his notes in Lang- 
baine, have raised the question whether Shake- 
speare died on the same day of the month on 
which he is supposed to have been born. But what 
matter whether he lived a day more or less than 
fifty-two full years } He had lived long enough. 
His work was done, and he had tasted, nay, had 
drained, life's cup of bitter sweet. Dugdale 
tells us that his monument was the work of Ge- 
rard Johnson, an eminent sculptor of the period ; 
others have attributed it to Thomas Stanton ; and 
experts have supposed that the face was modelled 
from a cast taken after death. Be this as it may, 
the bust must be accepted as the most authentic 
likeness that we have of Shakespeare. It was 
originally colored after life. The eyes were light 
8* L 



178 



MEMOIRS OF 



hazel, the hair and beard auburn, the complexion 
fair ; the doublet was scarlet ; the tabard, or loose 
gown without sleeves thrown over the doublet, 
black ; the neck and wristbands white ; the up- 
per side of the cushion green, the under, crimson ; 
its cord and tassels, gilt. The colors were re- 
newed in 1749; but in 1793 Malone, tastelessly 
and ignorantly classic, had the whole figure paint- 
ed white by a house-painter. A flat stone covers 
the grave. Upon it is the following strange in- 
scription : — 

Good Frend for Iesvs sake forbears 
to digg the dust encloased heare 
Blest be y^ man y'^ spares thes stones 
And curst be he y'^ moves my bones. 

A Mr. Dowdall, in an existing letter to Mr. Ed- 
ward Southwell, dated April loth, 1692, says that 
these lines were written by the poet himself a 
little before his death. Dowdall plainly records 
a tradition which possibly may have been well 
founded. It is more probable, however, that to 
prevent the removal of Shakespeare's remains to 
the charnel-house of the church, in compliance 
with a custom of the day and place, when time 
made other demands upon the space they occu- 
pied, some member of his family, or some friend, 
had this rude, hearty curse cut upon his tomb- 
stone. Tradition, not traceable higher than 1693, 
says his wife and daughters earnestly desired to 
be laid in the same grave with him, but that " not 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. j-tq 

one, for fear of the curse above said, dare touch his 
gravestone." It has had one good effect, at least. 
It has kept at Stratford those reUcs which but 
therefor would probably have been removed to 
Westminster Abbey. 

Shakespeare's wife and his two daughters — 
Susannah, married to Dr. Hall, and Judith, mar- 
ried to Thomas Quiney — survived him. His 
granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall, who also was liv- 
ing at the time of his death, was twice married ; 
first, to Thomas Nash, an esquire, of Stratford, 
and afterward to Mr. John Barnard of Abington 
in Northamptonshire, who was knighted by Charles 
II. in 1 66 1 ; but she had no children. Judith had 
three sons, who died unmarried ; and with Lady 
Barnard, who died in 1669-70, Shakespeare's fam- 
ily became extinct. His property was strictly 
entailed upon the male issue of his daughter Su- 
sannah, which failed to appear. The entail was 
broken by legal contrivance ; and soon after the 
death of Lady Barnard, the estate which he had 
gathered with so much labor and solicitude was 
dispersed. New Place, which was the home of 
his later years, was distinguished, in Lady Bar- 
nard's time, by the brief residence there of Queen 
Henrietta Maria, during the troubles of the Great 
Revolution. Mr. and Mrs. Nash entertained the 
Queen there for three weeks, in June, 1643, when, 
escorted by Prince Rupert and his troops, she was 
on her progress to join King Charles at Oxford, — 



l3o MEMOIRS OF 

an incident which would have been well-pleasing 
to Mistress Nash's grandfather. Afterward, as we 
have already seen, New Place fell into the hands 
of Sir Hugh Clopton, a descendant of its builder, 
who renovated and altered it ; and it was finally 
bought by the Reverend Francis Gastrell as his 
residence. He lived there several years, much 
annoyed by curious pilgrims to his house and to 
his garden, in which there was a mulberry-tree, 
which, according to the tradition of the town, 
Shakespeare planted with his own hands. This 
reverend gentleman was wealthy enough to in- 
dulge in that very .expensive luxury, a high tem- 
per. So at last he gave his vexation vent by cut- 
ting down the mulberry-tree,* and afterward, in 
1759, having quarrelled with the magistrates about 
assessments, he razed his house to the ground, 
and left the place, a petty ecclesiastic Erostratus, 
hooted and execrated by the Stratford people. 
Thus, within less than one hundred and fifty years 
of his death, all traces of Shakespeare had disap- 
peared from his native village, except his birth- 
place and his tomb. 

This is all that we know by authentic record, 
by tradition, and by inference, of him who stands 

* The wood of this tree was bought by a watchmaker of Strat- 
ford, who made it into boxes and similar articles. It must have 
attained an enormous size ; for there is enough of it extant to 
make a line-of-battle ship. But my piece and yours, reader, are 
genuine. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. igj 

alone in the highest niche of hterary fame. But 
this is much. It seems Httle only because of his 
greatness. Of many men not to be thought of 
in comparison with him we know indeed much 
more ; and in these days, when every man seems, 
like Pepys, to be his own Boswell, we are likely 
to know all ; but of many who occupy a place 
only second to his, we know much less. The 
causes of our ignorance of Shakespeare's life are 
partly the Puritanism which developed itself in the 
mother country during his life, and the consequent 
political convulsions which came so soon after his 
death, and lasted so long ; partly the frivolous 
and grovelling taste of the literary and dramatic 
school which came in with the Restoration, and 
prevailed for more than half a century, and which 
cared little about the works and less about the life 
of William Shakespeare ; partly, too, we may be 
sure, a desire on his part, characteristic of all cul- 
tivated people of English race, to keep personal 
affairs from publicity. But the total effect of these 
causes is small in comparison with the results of 
the indifference which prevailed among people 
of all ages and countries, until within the last 
hundred or hundred and fifty years, to the per- 
sonal character and private lives of poets, paint- 
ers, scientific men, and generally of all public per- 
sons not concerned in government. When men 
have control over the lives and fortunes of their 
fellow-citizens in peace, and are able to plunge 



1 32 MEMOIRS OF 

two nations into war, the world follows their move- 
ments with prying, wondering eyes ; but hereto- 
fore when they only amused, or even instructed, 
they must have achieved fame, and a generation 
or two must have passed away before the world at 
large concerned itself about their personal histo- 
ries. We know more of the lives of brutal, self- 
ish soldiers, and of crafty, selfish churchmen, who 
had no thought or purpose beyond the attainment 
or the preservation of power and place for them- 
selves and their adherents, than we do of men 
whose quiet, thoughtful labors have blessed and 
delighted millions from generation to generation. 
Of Shakespeare we know more than the Greeks 
knew of ^schylus, the father of their tragedy, or 
of Aristophanes, the father of their comedy, two 
centuries after they died. Public functions par- 
tially preserved the personal history of Sophocles 
from similar obscurity. Of Moliere, the greatest 
and most original of French dramatic writers, we 
have very meagre personal accounts ; and it is 
remarkable that not a page of his manuscripts is 
known to be in existence. The personal history 
of Shakespeare's great contemporary, Bacon, is 
well known ; but had he not become successively 
the King's Attorney-General, Sir Francis Bacon, 
Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, and Lord 
High Chancellor of England, Master Bacon might 
have written his Essays and worked out his No- 
vum Orgmion in happy, unobserved obscurity, and 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



183 



the world might have begun to inquire into his 
every-day Ufe only after it had discovered that 
he was the greatest philosopher and the worldly- 
wisest man of modern times. We are yet more 
ignorant of Shakespeare's fellow-craftsmen than 
we are of him. Of Beaumont and Fletcher, both 
born in the rank of gentry, one the son of a 
Judge, the other of a Bishop, we know little more 
than that they wrote their plays and lived in the 
society of the most intelligent men of their day. 
Chapman's associations and what he did are dis- 
covered only by indirect collateral evidence ; but 
eminent as he was, and highly esteemed as he 
appears to have been, nothing is recorded of his 
personal history. We are obliged to infer the 
year of his birth from the record of his age upon 
his portrait ; and time has left us no guide-post 
to his birthplace. The minor stars of the Eliz- 
abethan galaxy, the Greenes, Peeles, Marlowes, 
Websters, Fords, and such like, left hardly a 
trace behind them which their own pens had not 
written. Ben Jonson, who lived to see all the 
poets of the Elizabethan period in their graves, 
dnd to be an object of literary and almost anti- 
quarian interest to a new generation and a new 
school, left more materials for his memoirs than 
any contemporary poet. But it is only with his 
later years that we are thus acquainted. Of his 
youth and early manhood we are not less igno- 
rant than we are of Shakespeare's. 



1 84 



MEMOIRS OF 



How difficult it is to trace the vestiges of a 
life not passed in the performance of important 
public duty is shown by our ignorance of the 
youth and early manhood of the last great Eng- 
lish ruler of England, Oliver Cromwell : — last 
English ruler ; for since his time his place has 
been occupied, not filled, by certain Scotch and 
German men and women, sons and daughters of 
Scotch fathers and German fathers and mothers, 
not always even born in the British purple. Al- 
though he came, on both sides, of families of 
knightly rank and landed estate, and made him- 
self in effect absolute monarch of England and 
of Scotland south of the Grampians, the little 
that we know of him before he rose, at mature 
years, into notice in public life, is gathered from 
obscure tradition and official mention. We know 
more of William Shakespeare, yeoman's son and 
player, before he was forty years old, than we do 
of Oliver Cromwell, country gentleman and Lord 
Protector, at the same age. The same degree of 
doubt exists as to the occupation of the father 
of each of them, and the same uncertainty as to 
how and where they passed certain years of early 
life ; the debatable period being longer in the 
case of the Protector. The same truth in biog- 
raphy is illustrated by a striking deficiency in the 
biography of Washington. We are well and au- 
thoritatively informed as to the small details of 
his daily life after he entered the service of the 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



185 



revolted Colonies ; but his own nephew, to whom 
were open all family papers and records, and who 
was in communication with many of the friends 
and neighbors of his illustrious uncle, was unable 
to discover the date of his marriage, although his 
wife, Mrs. Custis, was one of the richliest dowered 
widows in all Virginia.* Instead, therefore, of 
our ignorance of Shakespeare's life being in it- 
self at all remarkable, we have reason for con- 
gratulation, that from one source or another we 
have learned so much upon a subject which in- 
terests us so greatly, but about which his gener- 
ation and its successor were so indifferent. 

Unlike Dante, unlike Milton, unlike Goethe, 
unlike the great poets and tragedians of Greece 
and Rome, Shakespeare left no trace upon the 
political, or even the social, life of his era. Of 
his eminent countrymen, Raleigh, Sidney, Spen- 
ser, Bacon, Cecil, Walsingham, Coke, Camden, 
Hooker, Drake, Hobbes, Inigo Jones, Herbert 
of Cherbury, Laud, Pym, Hampden, Selden, Wal- 
ton, Wdtton, and Donne may be properly reck- 
oned as his contemporaries ; and yet there is no 
proof whatever that he was personally known 
to either of these men, or to any others of less 
note among the statesmen, scholars, soldiers, and 
artists of his day, except the few of his fellow- 
craftsmen whose acquaintance with him has been 

* George Washington Parke Custis's Recollections of Washing- 
ton^ p. 502. 



1 86 MEMOIRS OF 

heretofore mentioned in these Memoirs. This, 
partly from the loss of evidence, and partly, per- 
haps, because he was not personally acquainted 
with any of these men. It is a common mistake 
to suppose that, even in these days of free inter- 
course, eminent persons who are contemporaries 
and countrymen must needs be brought into con- 
tact. Their personal relations, like those of other 
persons, are governed by prudential reasons and 
social influences, — greatly also by mere accident. 
Shakespeare's character, entirely free from those 
irregularities which are usually, but unreasonably, 
regarded as almost the necessary concomitants of 
genius, seems to have been of singular complete- 
ness and of perfect balance. Of his transcendent 
mental gifts, the results of the daily labor by which 
he first earned his bread and then made his for- 
tune remain as evidence ; and what else we know 
of him shows him to us in the common business 
and intercourse of life, upright, prudent, self-re- 
specting, — a man to be respected and relied upon. 
An actor at a time when actors were held in the 
lowest possible esteem, he won the kind regard 
and consideration of those who held high rank 
and station : a poet, he was not only thrifty but 
provident. Though careful of his own, he was 
not only just, but generous, to others. His integ- 
rity was early noticed ; and Jonson says " he was 
indeed honest, and of an open and free nature." 
Surpassing all his rivals, after the recoil of the 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 



187 



first surprise he was loved by all except tne mean- 
est souls among them ; and such men only love 
themselves. " Sweet " and " gentle " are the en- 
dearing epithets which they delighted to apply to 
him. In his position, to have produced this effect 
upon high and low he must have united a native 
dignity to a singular kindness of heart, evenness 
of temper, and graciousness of manner. His 
ready wit and his cheerfulness in social inter- 
course are particularly mentioned in tradition. 
To these qualities it is plain that he added a sym- 
pathy that was universal, — a gift which more than 
any other wins the love of all mankind. And, in- 
deed, it is to the effect of this moral quality that 
we owe the complete and multitudinous manifes- 
tation of his intellectual greatness. The Rever- 
end Mr. Davies, writing after 1688, says that "he 
died a Papist." If he became a member of the 
Church of Rome, it must have been after he 
wrote Romeo and ytiliet, in which he speaks of 
"evening mass" ; for the humblest member of that 
Church knows that there is no mass at vespers. 
The expression used by Davies implies, indeed, 
that Shakespeare died in a faith in which he had 
not been educated. But his report is improbable. 
In the overmuch righteousness of the puritanical 
period in which Shakespeare's last years were 
passed, a moderate degree of cheerfulness and 
Christian charity, to say nothing of conformity to 
the Church of England, might easily have brought 



igS MEMOIRS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 

the reproach of Papistry upon men less open to 
that suspicion than a retired player. Shake- 
speare, although he seems to have been a man of 
sincere piety, seems also to- have been without re- 
ligious convictions. His works are imbued with 
a high and heartfelt appreciation of the vital 
truths of Christianity ; but nowhere does he show 
a leaning towards any form of religious obser- 
vance, or of church government, or toward any 
theological tenet or dogma. No Church can claim 
him ; no simple Christian soul but can claim his 
fellowship. Such as this imperfect record shows 
was William Shakespeare ; a man who adorned 
an inferior and dignified an equivocal station in 
life, and who raised himself from poverty and ob- 
scurity to competence and honorable position by 
labors which, having their motive, not in desire 
of fame, but in duty and in manly independence, 
have placed him upon an enduring eminence to 
which in these after ages sane ambition does not 
aspire. 



AN ESSAY 

TOWARD THE EXPRESSION OF 
SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



May I express thee unblam'd ? " 



ESSAY. 



THE student of language, or the mere intelli- 
gent observer of the speech of his own day, 
cannot but notice how surely men supply them- 
selves with a word when one is needed. The 
new vocal sign is sometimes made, but is gener- 
ally found. A lack is felt, and the common in- 
stinct, vaguely stretching out its hands, lays hold 
of some common, or mayhap some half-forgotten 
or rarely used word, and, putting a new stamp 
upon it, converts it into current coin of another 
denomination, a recognized representative of new 
intellectual value. Purists may fret at the per- 
version, and philologers may protest against the 
genuineness of the new mintage ; but in vain. It 
answers the needs of those who use it, and that it 
should do so is all they require. A good example 
of the perversion of a word from its true etymo- 
logical meaning is the modern use of "several." 
This adjective not long ago conveyed only the 
idea of severance, and was generally applied but 
to two objects of one kind. Thus in old plays it 
is very common to find two personages directed to 



IQ2 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

enter by several doors, — meaning by two, or as 
we now say, with less etymological correctness, 
different doors ; for the two doors may not differ 
at all, but be exactly alike. But the need was felt 
of a word which should mean a greater number 
than a few, or some, and less than many ; and by 
general unexpressed consent "several" was put to 
that service ; so that the unlearned reader of the 
present day, who finds two persons directed in an 
old play to enter by several doors, is for the mo- 
ment puzzled as to the mode in which the instruc- 
tion is to be obeyed. 

The word " talent," in the sense of mental fac- 
ulty, affords an example both of appropriation and 
perversion. Its appropriation took place about 
three centuries ago ; but its perversion has been 
gradually going on within the memory of men yet 
living, and is perhaps hardly yet completed. And 
there is this singularity in its history, that it was 
taken at about the same time into the vocabu- 
laries of several languages of divers origin ; into 
all those in fact which felt the influence of the 
Christian Scriptures at the time of the revival 
of learning. Christ's parable of the servants who 
received a different number of talents in trust 
during their master's absence, in which the word 
is used with its original meaning of a sum of 
money, but figuratively to signify those personal 
gifts and advantages for the use of which each 
man is responsible, is the source of the word as it 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



193 



appears in all the languages of civilized Christen- 
dom ; it having been taken into them in its purely 
metaphorical signification.* But at first it was 
used to mean the natural bent of the mind ; and 
in fact, until the present generation, it was synon- 
ymous with " genius," a word which in its appli- 
cation to the mind or soul is, in our tongue at 
least, of later introduction. The earlier, as well 
as the later lexicographers of the English, French, 
and Italian languages, give definitions of these 
words which are really identical ; and Crabb him- 
self, although his function is that of nice dis- 
crimination, can divide them no further than by 
saying that "genius is the particular bent of the 
intellect which is born with a man," and that 
"talent is a particular mode of intellect which 
quahfies its possessor to do some things better 
than others " ; thus furnishing as perfect an ex- 
ample as could be given of distinction without 
difference. But since the author of the Synon- 
ymes issued the last edition of his work, 1837, 
the usage of intelligent people has been drawing 

* There is a fidgety dislike on the part of some persons to 
the word "talented," which some British critics brand as an 
" Americanism " ; and even Dr. Richardson is betrayed into say- 
ing, " Dr. Webster has the word ' talented,' and it has been too 
hastily used in common speech here." There is no ground what- 
ever of objection to the participial adjective, which does not apply 
to the noun. If " talent " be correctly used to mean mental gifts, 
it is as correct, as English, to say " a talented man," as to say 
" a moneyed corporation," or " a landed aristocracy." 

9 M 



194 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



a sharp line of demarkation between these two 
words. One, "genius," has been raised, and the 
other, " talent," has been degraded, from their for- 
mer common level. The next lexicographer who 
does his work with nicety and thoroughness must 
define "genius" as original creative mental power, 
and "talent" as that inferior and more common, 
though sometimes more expanded and more be- 
neficent faculty, which puts to new use facts al- 
ready known, principles already discovered, meth- 
ods of thought or expression already established, 
or which in literature and the arts of design pro- 
duces by labor and taste rather than by new con- 
ception. 

Genius may be of high or low order ; talent 
may be great or small ; genius may be pestilent, 
talent beneficent. But the former in its lower 
grades is not approached in kind by the latter in 
its larger developments, any more than a poor 
diamond is rivalled by a fine quartz crystal, or a 
living spring, from which flows but a thread of 
water, by a reservoir which supplies the daily 
needs of millions. Genius is as unmistakable in 
Gustave Dore's drawing on wood for book illus- 
tration, as in Raphael's Sistine Madonna ; while 
all the canvas which Giulio Romano covered with 
paintings in the grand style — some of them, in 
drawing and composition, not unworthy of his 
master — only made it manifest that he was a man 
of talent, who had studied. The throng of perfect, 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



195 



polished figures which Canova left behind him 
only bear multiplied witness to his talent ; but the 
few worn and broken marbles of the Parthenon 
proclaim a genius before which we stand mute in 
delight and wonder. We can see how taste and 
skill, culture and application, might produce many 
Canovas ; but who does not feel that what we 
bow down to in the Theseus and the Parcae is 
something which, although it may be cultivated 
and developed, cannot be acquired ^ Meyerbeer 
is an instance of a musician whose compositions, 
though rich and varied, and sometimes really 
grand masterpieces too of skill, are the produc- 
tions of only a great and highly cultivated talent. 
But had Schubert written only his Serenade, he 
would have shown that in his soul burned the na- 
tive fire of genius. The apothegm poefa nascitiLV, 
nonfit, is true only if by poet we mean no other 
than the poet of genius. But so we do not m.ean ; 
and we have crowned, and worthily crowned, a 
made poet with bays, and left a born poet to live 
by gauging the liquor that soothed his grief and 
quickened his inspiration. Perhaps Gray affords 
the most signal example of poetic talent devel- 
oped and cultivated to its utmost capability and 
perfection ; and his Elegy in a Country Chnrch- 
yard, the most admired instance of an exquisite 
work of poetic art produced by taste and fine 
susceptibility and labor, — in a word, by talent. 
But certainly the highest manifestation of genius 



196 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



in poetry is Shakespeare, who indeed united in 
himself genius in its supremest nature and talent 
in its largest development ; adding to the peculiar 
and original powers of his mind a certain dexteri- 
ty and sagacity in the use of them which are fre- 
quently the handmaids of talent, but which are 
rarely found in company with genius. 

There are two great divisions of genius. One 
supplies the needs and expresses the spirit of its 
age ; the other finds its inspiration in elemental 
truth, and deals only with that which is eternal. 
Of the three great poets of the world, (if we pass 
by the author of the Book of Job,) Homer, work- 
ing in the simplest elements of human nature-, 
and limited less than any one of his successors 
by artificial modes of thought and forms of life, 
himself a mere voice, chanting an unconscious 
epic in the dim twilight beyond the farther verge 
of history, and telling the story of man's youth 
before his anxious eye had been turned inward, 
belongs pre-eminently to the universal type of 
genius, and therefore appeals directly to both in- 
structed and uninstructed minds ; while of those 
who found their inspiration in their own experi- 
ence, Dante the chief, as much politician as poet, 
making a hell for his foes and a heaven for his 
friends, cannot be fully understood without some 
knowledge of the period and the country in which 
he lived. Hence it is that even among his coun- 
trymen Dante is and always must remain the 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



197 



poet of the instructed few ; while unlearned men 
of all bloods and all ages find in the barrier of a 
foreign tongue their only hindrance to perusing 
with a common delight the ever fresh and ever 
living page of Homer. But Shakespeare pre- 
sented as simply and directly as Homer to the 
universal mind of man the perennial truth of un- 
changing nature. This seems to have been per- 
ceived by his very contemporaries. Ben Jonson, 
in the only line of his eulogy of Shakespeare 
which is generally known, and which, continually 
cited, is almost as often destructively misquoted, 
expresses this appreciation of his beloved friend 
and fellow. It will be recognized by nearly every 
reader, in these words : 

" He was not for an age, but for all time." 

But this was not what Jonson wrote. He said of 
Shakespeare, 

" He was not of an age, but for all time "; 

and the almost universal substitution of the one 
preposition for the other shows a failure to appre- 
ciate Jonson's meaning, and degrades a most re- 
markable expression of the high quality of Shake- 
speare's genius into a clever antithetical utterance 
of the commonplace eulogy that his fame would 
endure forever. Jonson said, and the context as 
well as the line itself shows his meaning, that 
Shakespeare was not a man of his age, but that 
what he wrote was for, adapted to, all time. The 



198 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



voice of more than two centuries has confirmed 
this far-reaching and discriminating judgment. 
Yet it but partly told the truth ; for Shakespeare 
alone of all great poets attained the highest and 
rarest combination of power, and united in him- 
self the two kinds of genius. He was both of his 
age and for all time. Only his race could have 
produced him, (for a Celtic, a Scandinavian, or 
even a German Shakespeare is inconceivable,) and 
that race only at the time when he appeared. 

The English or so-called Anglo-Saxon race is 
distinguished by a sober earnestness and down- 
rightness of character, which manifests itself even 
in its narrative, dramatic, and poetical literature ; 
and our greatest poet, universal although he was, 
marked himself peculiarly ours by raising his diz- 
zy pile of fancy and imagination upon the broad 
and solid foundation of English common-sense. 
The eminence of the rugged and solid English 
mind in all departments of poetry is a noteworthy 
intellectual phenomenon. It seems akin to one 
observable in music, where we see that the most 
brilliant vocalization is that of large and robust 
voices carefully trained and painfully broken in to 
flexibility ; and in fact, that the dazzling effects of 
rapid movement are in direct ratio to the physical 
inertia which has, or which seems to have been, 
overcome. No trill like that of the heroic-voiced 
Jenny Lind, which had the weight and the 
steady beat of an antique pendulum, although it 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. Iqq 

quivered like the reflection of sunlight from water. 
But Shakespeare not only thought and spoke as 
an Englishman, and so was always truly national,* 
(although of his plots not historical only one is 
English,) he thought and spoke only as an Eng- 
lishman could think and speak in the Elizabethan 
era. Before that period our forefathers were too 
rude, and since we have become, on both sides of 
the water, too lettered a folk, though not too learn- 
ed, for such an utterance. Who can conceive of 
Hamlet or King Lear or the MereJiant of Veniee 
being written by a contemporary of John Skelton, 
by a dramatist of the Restoration, by one of the 
wits of Queen Anne's reign, or by either king or 
subject in Johnson's realm of letters .? Had any 
man been moved to write them at either of those 
periods, the public would not have listened to them, 
produced as new compositions. In the style and 

* Nation has come to mean the people under one government. 
As, for instance, the British nation is composed of English, 
Scotch, Welsh, and Irish people ; and the nation which is called 
most improperly, but it would seem inevitably, American, is com- 
posed of the same peoples, with a still greater predominance of 
the English element, to which within the last twenty years there 
has been a considerable addition of Germans. Owing to pecu- 
liar political, social, and material conditions, the assimilation of 
the minor elements goes on much more rapidly here than in the 
mother country ; and the English or Anglo-Saxon race, stub- 
bornly preserving its own characteristics, as it ever has done, ab- 
sorbs here those who flee to it for refuge, as in the mother coun- 
try it absorbed its nominal conquerors. But there is no other 
word than "national" suited to the sentence above written: 
"ethnical" will not serve the purpose. 



200 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

in the vocabulary of the so-called Augustan age 
of English literature, or in the Johnsonian period, 
such writing would have been impossible. Yet 
bearing thus plainly the mark of the time as well 
as of the race which produced them, these writ- 
ings have as their chief distinction, that what- 
ever they possess of beauty is beautiful, and 
whatever they tell of truth is true to all mankind 
forever. The attempt to explain such an intellect- 
ual phenomenon seems indeed presumptuous. We 
may rightly admire what we cannot fully under- 
stand ; we may apprehend what we cannot com- 
prehend, and comprehend that which we cannot 
express ; and I own that I shrink back as I essay 
to measure with my little line and fathom with my 
puny plummet the vast profound of Shakespeare's 
genius. 

Individual organization determines preference ; 
but organization and circumstances together de- 
termine choice, which is preference moved by will, 
or preference in action. Happily both these 
joined to make a dramatist of Shakespeare. Cir- 
cumstances took him to London to earn his bread ; 
circumstances made the theatre the aptest field 
for his labor ; and his organization fitted him su- 
premely for the dramatic function. Yet, had he 
been born in the present day, it may at least be 
questioned whether he would have chosen the 
drama as his profession; for in contemporary Eng- 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 201 

lish literature, indeed upon our very stage, there is 
no indigenous drama. One great cause of this, how- 
ever, is the fact, that Shakespeare has so entirely- 
covered the field that there is neither room for 
new dramatic literature nor need of it ; only for 
intrigue, incident, by-play, the scene-painter, and 
the tailor. Perhaps he might have chosen jour- 
nalism, but more probably trade ; for competency 
was the sole object of his exertion. It is clear 
from what we know of him, that he would have 
made an influential journalist, or a first-rate mer- 
chant. But living in the reign of Elizabeth, he 
went to London to become an actor and write 
plays for a London audience. 

Never, perhaps, did imaginative works, written 
to please the public of a great city, have less of a 
town air, of that urban quality which, for in- 
stance, is so striking in Pope's poems, in Addi- 
son's essays, and in the plays of their period and 
of Dryden's, than is to be found in Shakespeare's 
dramas. They have local allusions, it is true, but 
these are comparatively few ; and were they many, 
this would not touch the point. They are so free 
from city taint, that in this respect they might 
have been written at a country-seat by one who 
had never passed its boundaries or made himself 
acquainted with the tone of the metropolis. Yet 
it was only in London that those plays could 
have been written. London had only just before 
Shakespeare's day made its metropoHtan suprem- 



202 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

acy felt, as well as acknowledged, throughout 
England. As long as two hundred years after 
that time the county of each member of Parlia- 
ment was betrayed by his tongue ; but then the 
speech of the cultivated people of Middlesex and 
its vicinity had become for all England the undis- 
puted standard. Northumberland, or Cornwall, 
or Lancashire, might have produced Shakespeare's 
mind ; but had he lived in any one of those coun- 
ties, or in another, like them remote in speech as 
in locality from London, and written for his rural 
neighbors instead of the audiences of the Black- 
friars and the Globe, the music of his poetry would 
have been lost in sounds uncouth and barbarous to 
the general ear, and the edge of his fine utterance 
would have been turned upon the stony rough- 
ness of his rustic phraseology. His language 
would have been a dialect which must needs have 
been translated to be understood by modern Eng- 
lish ears, with the loss of that heavy discount 
which is always paid at the desk of the broker in 
literary exchange. For us of after days, and so 
for the perpetuity and diffusion of Shakespeare's 
fame, he appeared at a most propitious period of 
the history of our race, not only as to its language, 
but as to its political and social condition. As to 
language, there was then a freedom from critical 
and scholastic restraint which has never since 
existed, united to a copiousness of vocabulary, 
which, except in the direction of philosophy and 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



203 



science, has not been materially enlarged. The 
English language, even the English of London, 
although Chaucer and Spenser had used it, was 
regarded then in England itself as unfit for the 
use of scholars. English literature held no ad- 
mitted place in the realm of letters ; and the 
English people were of small consideration in 
Europe. Andrew Borde, a physician of Henry 
the Eighth's time, in his Book of the IntrodiLction 
of Knowledge, says : " The speche of Englande 
is a base speche to other noble speches, as Italion, 
Castylion, & Frenche ; howbeit the speche of 
Englande of late dayes is amended." And Lilly, 
Shakespeare's contemporary, makes his Euphues, 
in describing England, speak of "the English 
tongue, which is, as I have heard, almost bar- 
barous." 

We are accustomed to think of London as the 
capital of a great kindred empire, which is in 
letters as well as in arms and commerce one of 
the five or six great powers of the civilized world. 
We measure its importance by the fact of its 
being the time-honored literary metropolis of 
the great kingdom and the great republic whose 
tongue it speaks. But at the time of Shake- 
speare's arrival there, although that time was the 
glorious reign of Queen Elizabeth, London was 
only the chief city of the southern part of a lit- 
tle island which then contained the whole Eng- 
lish race, — a race which had not yet taken its 



204 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

appointed place among the nations. Haughty 
Spain, splendid in the spoil of the Indies, France, 
chivalric and courtly, and Italy, rich in art, in lit- 
erature, and learning, looked down upon us as 
rude islanders who spoke an uncouth tongue, — a 
people not much to be regarded, but not to be 
interfered with or offended, because, as Euphues 
says, English folk "are impatient in their anger 
of any equall ; readie to revenge an injurie, but 
never wont to proffer any ; they never fight with- 
out provoking, and once provoked they never 
cease." It would seem that in some respects at 
least the traits of race have not changed during 
three centuries, on either side of the water. In- 
deed, as a people it was not until the beginning of 
Elizabeth's reign that we attained to the full ma- 
turity of our English-hood. The great civil wars, 
which involved three generations, though lasting 
but thirty years, and which ended by placing the 
Tudors on the throne, were not only the expir- 
ing throes of feudalism, they were the pangs of a 
new birth, and that birth was the English nation. 
Until after the reign of Henry the Seventh the 
people of England, although politically bound to- 
gether, were as little penetrated by that unity of 
feeling and character which we call the genius of 
a nation as could possibly be in a community 
mainly of one origin, which had lived for nearly 
a thousand years in one small country, isolated 
from other peoples by the sea, and for six cen- 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 205 

turies under one government. Yet up to that 
period the habits and tone of thought, even among 
the governing and cultivated classes, those which 
held most frequent communication with each 
other and felt most the influence of the court, 
were so unlike, for instance in Northumberland, 
Kent, and Cornwall, that they might have served 
to distinguish alien and hostile populations. But 
during the long and tranquil reigns of the first 
Tudor and of his immediate successor the English 
people became knit together through peaceful 
intercourse, and by assimilation of thought and 
manners among the superior classes. And even 
among the yeomanry and peasantry the Wars 
of the Roses, by disturbing the inertness and lo- 
cal isolation of people otherwise tied to the soil 
on which they lived, and ignorant of their own 
countrymen beyond their own narrow neighbor- 
hood, by sending them in large bodies through 
the land, thus mingling their blood and measu- 
rably assimilating their dialects by attrition, did 
much to establish the condition of a true na- 
tionality. 

The nation whose various elements were thus 
upheaved by the ploughshare, and intermingled 
by the harrow of war, lay fallow under the genial 
skies of the long succeeding days of peace, gaining 
strength and unity for the new growth which was to 
enrich it for the first time throughout its borders 
with an indigenous and common harvest. To this 



2o6 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

people thus made approximately homogeneous, 
the Reformation came and completed the enfran- 
chisement which the destruction of feudalism had 
but partly accomplished. The English character 
did not completely attain its ideal type until after 
it had freed itself from the fetters of feudality and 
cast off the yoke of Rome. During the century 
which succeeded the latter event it seems to have 
been more purely and absolutely, and at the same 
time unconsciously and generously, English, than 
the influences of party politics, the entangling in- 
terests of an extended empire, and the artificial pres- 
ervation of a dead form of society, have permitted 
it to be since that period. Then from this people, 
thus interfused, thus tried and purified, thus in- 
vigorated by repose, in the first flush and strength 
of its perfected and awakened nature, there sprang 
an array of men glorious in arts and arms, in 
learning and in literature, in commerce and in 
statesmanship. The rich intellectual product of 
the Elizabethan era was like nothing that the 
world has seen, except the outburst of genius in 
Greece after the Persian war, which produced 
Pericles, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Thu- 
cydides, Socrates, Plato, and Phidias. It was this 
period, celebrated under the name of the princess 
whose reign filled the greater part of it, and which 
extended from about 1575 to 1625, which pro- 
duced the men who changed the position of the 
English people before the world ; and chief 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 207 

among them, though not then reckoned of them, 
was WilUam Shakespeare. 

Not until the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
tury did Shakespeare's own race acknowledge, 
with one consent, that the rustic-bred playwright 
was the greatest of poets, and one of the wisest, if 
not the wisest, of men. It took us two hundred 
years to bring ourselves with unanimity to the 
simple acceptance of that miracle. We literally 
brought ourselves to it ; for the professed scholars 
and critics rather hindered than helped our pro- 
gress to that large appreciation, in which they 
were ever behind the people. In fact Shake- 
speare's supreme popularity dates from his own 
day ; and in this respect it was not exceptional, 
but conformed to a rule which is almost universal. 
The judgment of posterity may reverse, or it may 
confirm, enhance, and diffuse the approval of con- 
temporaries ; but in literature the man who fails 
to please those to whom he addresses himself has 
failed forever. We have contemporary testimony 
to the fact that Shakespeare's plays were regarded 
by the public of his own day as incomparably su- 
perior to those of all his rivals ; and it may be 
doubted whether a remarkable appreciation of 
them which was printed in the bookseller's Ad- 
dress to the Reader of TjvUus and Cressida, in 
1609, that "they serve for the most common com- 
mentaries of all the actions of our lives," has been 
more than decorated and illustrated, amplified and 



2o8 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

weakened, by all subsequent criticism. It was 
the demand of succeeding ages for these dramas, 
the delight in them which was constantly felt and 
expressed, broadening, deepening, strengthening, 
with each generation, and the moral and intel- 
lectual influence which they exerted, which com- 
pelled the critics to undertake to account for this 
extraordinary phenomenon in literature. The lit- 
erary history of the seventeenth century, during the 
first sixteen years of which Shakespeare was alive, 
shows a demand for his plays by the reading pub- 
lic unapproached in the case of any other author. 
The fondness grew. It included all classes of 
readers, from the most thoughtful to those who 
merely sought in books a momentary pastime. 
In the first half of the eighteenth century the 
demand of the public for Shakespeare's plays was 
at least fourfold greater than that for any other 
book, notwithstanding the great number already 
issued from the press, and in spite of the fact that 
the most admired and elegant writer of the early 
part of that period had devoted his best powers 
to the diflusion of a taste for the works of our 
great epic poet, while he hardly mentions those 
of the greater dramatist. Yet the literary men of 
his own day who praise Shakespeare, almost with- 
out exception, leave his plays unnoticed, and limit 
their eulogy to his Venus and Adonis and his Lu- 
crece ; and the critics of the eighteenth century, 
yielding personally, as we can see, to the spell of 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 200 

his genius, were yet reluctant, doubtful, and trou- 
bled with many scruples when they came to ac- 
count for all the admiration of which they them- 
selves and their labors were living witnesses. 
True, one of them, himself a poet. Pope, passed 
in happy phrase one of the most penetrative judg- 
ments that has been uttered upon him, when he 
said : " The poetry of Shakespeare is inspiration 
indeed. He is not so much an imitator as an in- 
strument of Nature ; and it is not so just to say 
that he speaks for her, as that she speaks through 
him." But he, like all his contemporaries and im- 
mediate successors, thought it necessary to praise 
and blame with alternate breath, and to point out 
deformities manifold and monstrous in this be- 
witching but untutored and half-savage child of 
nature. Yet at this very time the intelligent love 
of Shakespeare was so deeply rooted in the Eng- 
lish mind that his words and thoughts pierced, 
like multitudinous fibres, the intellectual being of 
the people ; and while these men and their little 
rhymes and their bulbous sentences might have 
lived or perished, and no harm been done, and lit- 
tle notice taken, he could not have been uptorn 
without a disturbance of the whole English na- 
ture, and a destruction of no small part of the 
phraseology of common life. 

This being true as to the relative position of our 
own critics to our own spontaneous appreciation 
of Shakespeare, still more is it true with regard to 

N 



210 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

the relations of foreign critics to that appreciation. 
Some people, who ought to have known better, 
have more than half admitted that the German 
critics taught us to understand our own poet. I 
am unwilling to believe this of the English race in 
Europe ; I know that it is not true of that part of 
it which is in America. Here at least there is, and 
always has been, a class of people so large and so 
diffused through society that it cannot be rightly 
called a class, who do not know that there are Ger- 
man critics, who have little acquaintance with any 
criticism, to whom Schlegel is unrevealed and 
Coleridge is but a name, and who would quietly 
smile at the notion that " at last " we understand 
Shakespeare, because some learned people have 
said very profound sayings about his revelations 
of " the inner life." I have an abiding faith which 
no criticism that I have yet seen has shaken, that 
most of those who read Shakespeare worthily and 
lovingly understand what he meant as thoroughly 
as Coleridge did, or as Gervinus does, with all their 
metaphysics and philosophy. All honor to them 
for what they have written ; which is in itself ad- 
mirable, and which it would not be well lightly to 
undertake to rival or to imitate. But we must 
be careful not to confound perception with expres- 
sion, or comprehension with power of analysis. 
Newton saw no better, rejoiced no more in the 
beauty of color, than other people, because he 
analyzed the sunbeam. The ignorant monk, who 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 211 

would have roasted him as a sorcerer, illuminated 
missals with an intuitive mastery of the harmo- 
nies of the prism which he could not have attained 
by all his experiments or explained by all his the- 
ories. Shakespeare himself, who seems to have 
seen and understood all mental relations and con- 
ditions, saw this, and, as if with an eye of favor 
upon the millions who would read him with simple 
pleasure, made Birone say of the astronomers : 

" These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights, 
That give a name to every fixed star, 
Have no more profit of their shining nights 
Than those that walk and wot not what they are." 

It was by no strange feature or striking peculiar- 
ity in the construction of his works that Shake- 
speare commanded the attention and won the 
applause of his contemporaries. In their design, 
as in their very means and methods, his plays 
were like those of his immediate predecessors, 
which themselves were the fruits of a slow and 
compact growth. He affected no novelties, es- 
sayed no surprise. He did just what others did, 
but did it incomparably better, supremely best. 
He did not even seek to awaken interest by origi- 
naUty in the stories of his dramas. Beginning 
his career by working over old plays, and perform- 
ing his labor in company with others, when he 
came to be an independent writer and the sole 
author of plays, he still used old chronicles and 



212 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

plays and stories, the subjects of which were fa- 
miUar to many of his audience ; and he adopted 
the forms of the old plays with little variation. 
This he did, not only for convenience and expedi- 
tion, but because the public for which he wrote 
was more easily interested by dramas with the 
subjects of which they were acquainted, than by 
those the subjects of which were entirely new. 

That which first distinguished Shakespeare from 
the little throng of dramatists among whom and 
with some of whom he first labored, was the char- 
acter of his thought and the language in which 
he clothed it, — in a word, his style. It is this 
which first strikes the attention of the reader of 
the present day when he takes up Shakespeare's 
works. It is this by which we are enabled to dis- 
tinguish his writing from that of other dramatists 
in the same play, as in the First and Second Parts 
of King Henry the Sixth, the Taming of the Shrew, 
and Pericles. The distinction can be made with 
a very great degree of certainty by any one qual- 
ified by natural gifts and practice for such investi- 
gations, even with regard to Shakespeare's earliest 
writing. It is not that Shakespeare is all fine 
gold and others are all dross ; but when we know 
that of several mines one produced gold, another 
silver, and another lead, and when we find gold 
and dross, or silver and dross, or lead and dross, or 
gold and silver and lead together, we need not be 
in much doubt as to the distribution of the own- 
ership. 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 2n 

Purely English as Shakespeare was in what we 
may call the externals of his dramatic art, he was 
in no respect more so than in his style. In the 
earlier half of the sixteenth century Italian litera- 
ture had begun to exercise a modifying influence 
upon that of England, and especially upon Eng- 
lish poetry. Surrey, Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, 
Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Drayton, Milton, all 
show the effect of this influence. In Shake- 
speare's writings it does not appear, except, per- 
haps, in his erotic pastoral poem, Vemis and Adonis. 
His very sonnets are free from any traits of Ital- 
ian spirit or versification. He went to Italian 
literature, in his time the great mint and treasure- 
house of fiction ; but it was only for the raw ma- 
terial of a tragedy like Othello, or a comedy like 
The Merchajit of Venice. He doubtless read Ital- 
ian well enough to master the works of the early 
Italian novelists ; but although the literature of 
that language could not but have insensibly 
enlivened his genius and enriched his stores of 
thought, it had no perceptible eflect upon his 
mental tone, his turn of expression, or his choice 
of imagery. He is as free from the influence of 
this as he is from that of classic literature, — the 
imitation of which was in vogue with the regular- 
ly educated writers of his day. His vocabulary, 
at once his means of thought and medium of ex- 
pression, is merely that of his time, that which was 
used by his dramatic contemporaries and by the 



214 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

translators of the Bible. Writing for the gen- 
eral public, he used such language as would con- 
vey his meaning to his auditors, — the common 
phraseology of his period. But what a language 
was that ! In its capacity for the varied and 
exact expression of all moods of mind, all forms 
of thought, all kinds of emotion, a tongue un- 
equalled by any other known to literature ! A 
language of exhaustless variety ; strong without 
ruggedness, and flexible without effeminacy. A 
manly tongue ; yet bending itself gracefully and 
lovingly to the tenderest and the daintiest needs 
of woman, and capable of giving utterance to 
the most awful and impressive thoughts in home- 
ly words that come from the lips and go to the 
heart of childhood. It would seem as if this 
language had been preparing itself for centuries 
to be the fit medium of utterance for the world's 
greatest poet. Hardly more than a generation 
had passed since the English tongue had reached 
its perfect maturity ; just time enough to have it 
well worked into the unconscious usage of the peo- 
ple, when Shakespeare appeared, to lay upon it a 
burden of thought which would test its extremest 
capability. He found it fully formed and devel- 
oped, but not yet uniformed and cramped and dis- 
ciplined by the lexicographers and rhetoricians, — 
those martinets of language, who seem to have 
lost for us in force and flexibility as much as they 
have gained for us in precision. The phrase- 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



215 



ology of that day was notably large and simple 
among ordinary writers and speakers. Among 
the college-bred writers and their imitators, there 
was too great a fondness for little conceits ; but 
even with them this was an extraneous blemish, 
like that sometimes found in the ornament upon 
a noble building. Shakespeare seized this instru- 
ment, to whose tones all ears were open, and with 
the touch of a master he brought out all its har- 
monies. It lay ready to any hand ; but his was 
the first to use it with absolute control ; and 
among all his successors, great as some are, he 
has had, even in this single respect, no rival. No 
unimportant condition of his supreme mastery 
over expression was his entire freedom from re- 
straint — it may almost be said from conscious- 
ness — in the choice of language. He was no pre- 
cisian, no etymologist, no purist. He was not pur- 
posely writing literature. The only criticism that 
he feared was that of his audience, which repre- 
sented the English people of all grades above the 
peasantry. These he wished should not find his 
writing incomprehensible or dull : no more. If 
we except the translators of the Bible, Shake- 
speare wrote the best English that has yet been 
written ; but they who speak of it as remarkably 
pure, that is, as having a notably small admixture 
of Romance words, utter mere vague, unwarranted 
encomium. In the sixteenth century there were 
probably more Romance words adopted into our 



2i6 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

language than there had been before, or have been 
since, if we exclude words of technical or quasi- 
technical character. These words Shakespeare 
and the translators of the Bible used at need with 
unconscious freedom. The vocabularies both of 
the Bible and of Shakespeare's plays show forty 
per cent of Romance or Latin words, which, with 
the exception just named, is probably a larger 
proportion than is now used by our best writers ; 
certainly larger than is heard from those who 
speak their mother tongue with spontaneous idio- 
matic correctness.* So many Latin words having 
been adopted into the English language in the 
Elizabethan era, and English having been up to 
that period almost excluded from literature, the 
Latin element then retained much of its native 
character ; to which fact is due, in some measure, 
Shakespeare's use of words of Latin origin in 
their radical signification. But although he uses 
them thus oftener than any of his contemporaries, 
we may be sure that it was the result of no yield- 
ing to the constraints of scholarship. In brief, 
words were his slaves, not he theirs ; and if one 
could serve his purpose better than another, he 
did not stop to ask the birthplace or to trace the 
lineage of his servant. He will compose verse 
after verse almost wholly of Anglo-Saxon mono- 
syllables ; and this equally in passages descriptive, 

* See Lectures on the English Language, by the Hon. George 
P. Marsh, LL.D., pp. 124, 125. 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 217 

dramatic, and lyric, and of the utmost dissimilari- 
ty of sentiment. 

" The moon shines bright. — In such a night as this, 
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, 
And they did make no noise, — in such a night, 
Troilus methinks mounted the Trojan walls. 
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents. 
Where Cressida lay that night." 

" Howl, howl, howl, howl ! — O, you are men of stone ! 
Had I your tongues and ej^es I 'd use them so 
That heaven's vault should crack. — She 's gone forever ! 
I know when one is dead, and when one lives : 
She 's dead as earth. — Lend me a looking-glass : 
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone. 
Why, then she lives." 

" Vex not his ghost ! O, let him pass : he hates him 
That would upon the rack of this tough world 
Stretch him out longer." 

" Take, O take those lips away 
That so sweetly were forsworn. 
And those eyes, the break of day. 
Eyes that do mislead the morn. 
But my kisses bring again, — bring again. 
Seals of love, but sealed in vain,— sealed in vain." 

On the other hand, he will make two Latin 
words fill an entire verse, except perhaps one syl- 
lable. 

" He and Aufidius can no more atone 
Than violentest contrariety." 

** You shout me forth 
In acclamations hyperbolical." 

" No, this my hand will rather 
The multitudinous seas incarnadine." 
lo 



2i8 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

" This supernatural soliciting 
Cannot be good, cannot be ill." 

" Think'st thou to catch my life so pleasantly 
As to prenominate in nice conjecture 
Where thou wilt hit me dead ? " 

These brief passages furnish us five verses, 
each composed, except a monosyllable or two, of 
two Latin words, and each of these verses preced- 
ed or followed, or both preceded and followed, by 
one made up of short native words. 

Shakespeare discriminates with exquisite nicety 
between the fitness of romance and of native 
words. He writes of Cleopatra: 

" Age cannot wither 
Nor custom stale her infinite variety." 

But in Pericles he makes the Prince, speaking of 
the obtaining of the beautiful prize who has tempt- 
ed so many men to their destruction, say, — not 

" To gain such infinite felicity," — 

but, counter-changing, in the herald's phrase, his 
Anglo-Saxon and his Latin, 

" To compass such a boundless happiness." 

To an English ear "boundless happiness" means 
more, comes more directly home, than "infinite 
felicity " ; while on the other hand " compass," 
though strictly inapplicable to anything bound- 
less, conveys an idea of encircling, which is most 
appropriate to the occasion. Again, Shakespeare 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 2IQ 

mingles words of native and of foreign origin 
which are synonymous, so closely as to subject 
him to the charge of pleonasm, — a charge which 
can, for the like reason, be brought against the 
noble liturgy of the Church of England. He has, 
for instance, in King yoJuiy " infinite and bound- 
less reach," in Measure for Measure^ " rebate and 
blunt his natural edge," and in OthellOy " to such 
exsufflicate and blown surmises." It is thus man- 
ifest that Shakespeare was secure in his use of 
words, and thoughtless except as to their power to 
serve his present purpose. So that there can be 
no more futile objection to a reading in his plays, 
than that the doubtful word occurs in no other 
passage of his writing. For if he had occasion 
to use a word but once, or, for that matter, to make 
it for his single need, he would have used or made 
it without hesitation. Yet his intuitive knowledge 
of the peculiar value of words of various deriva- 
tion is continually manifest. That he was keenly 
sensible of the ludicrous effect of long Latin words 
in certain situations is manifest, not only from 
such instances as Costard's conclusion, that remu- 
neration is " the Latin word for three farthings," 
and Bardolph's definition of accommodated, "that 
is when a man is as they say accommodated, or, 
when a man is, being, whereby, a may be thought 
to be accommodated, which is an excellent thing," 
but from such usage as that in Sir Toby Belch's 
rejoinder to Maria's remonstrance against his rois- 



220 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

tering behavior, — "Tilly vally, am I not consan- 
guineous ? " — where the use of the Latin word and 
the abstract idea has a humor which would be lost 
had he said, "Am I not her kinsman ?" 

Shakespeare's freedom in the use of words was 
but a part of that conscious irresponsibility to 
critical rule which had such an important influ- 
ence upon the development of his whole dramatic 
style. To the working of his genius under this 
entire unconsciousness of restraint we owe the 
grandest and the most delicate beauties of his 
poetry, his most poignant expressions of emotion, 
and his richest and subtlest passages of humor. 
For the superiority of his work is just in pro- 
portion to his carelessness of literary criticism. 
His poems, the least excellent of his writings, 
were written for the literary world ; and it is 
upon them that his contemporaries, in passing 
literary judgment, found his reputation. His son- 
nets, which occupy a middle place, were written 
for himself or for his private friends, and were ob- 
tained for publication in some indirect way. His 
plays were mere entertainments for the general 
public, written, not to be read, but to be spoken ; 
written as business, just as Rogers wrote money 
circulars, or as Bryant writes leading articles. 
This freedom was suited to the unparalleled rich- 
ness and spontaneousness of his thought, of which 
it was in fact partly the result and itself partly 
the condition. Ben Jonson had these traits of his 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 221 

friend's genius in his mind when he wrote that 
passage in his Discoveries in which he tells us that 
he " had an excellent phantsy, brave notions, and 
gentle expressions ; wherein he flow'd with that 
facility that it was sometimes necessary he should 
be stopp'd. StLfflaminandiis erat, as Augustus 
said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power ; 
would the rule of it had been so too." The whole 
of the passage of Seneca from which Jonson 
quotes, is so notably applicable to Shakespeare 
that it deserves to be preserved entire. 

" Itaque divus Augustus optime dixit : Haterius noster suf- 
flaminandus est. Adeo non currere, sed decurrere videbatur ; nee 
verborum tantum illi copia, sed etiam rerum erat ; quotiens vel- 
les eandem rem, et quamdiu velles, diceret." — Excerpta Contro- 
versiarum. Lib. IV. Praef. 

We, with our dictionaries and our books of syn- 
onymes, our thesauruses of words and phrases to 
facilitate literary composition, our Blairs and our 
Kameses, may think, some of us, that we have 
smoothed the road to literary excellence, when 
we have but cumbered our movement and dis- 
tracted our attention. After all, the secret of the 
art of writing is to have somewhat to say, and to 
say just that and no other. We think in words, 
and when we lack fit words we lack fit thoughts. 
When we strive to write finely for the sake of doing 
so, we become bombastic or inane. Oldisworth, 
quoted by Dr. Johnson in his Lives of the Poets, 
says of Edmund Neale (known under the assumed 
name of Smith), who had a great reputation in his 



222 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

own day : " Writing with ease what could easily 
be written moved his indignation. When he was 
writing upon a subject he would seriously consid- 
er what Demosthenes, Homer, Virgil, or Horace, 
if alive, would say upon that occasion, which 
whetted him to exceed himself as well as others." 
Which I take it is one principal reason why, al- 
though the world yet hears something of Demos- 
thenes, of Homer, of Virgil, and of Horace, it has 
long ceased to hear anything of Neale. It must 
not be supposed, however, that Shakespeare, in 
the composition of his plays, was guided by no 
written law, because in his day in England no lit- 
erary law had yet been written. In The Garden 
of Eloquence, by Henry Peacham, published in 
1577, there are forms and figures of speech de- 
scribed and classified and named to the number 
of two hundred and more, with apt rules to use 
them withal. But not seeking to square his work 
by these rules, Shakespeare wrote in his marvel- 
lous fashion, because, if he wrote at all, it was just 
as easy for him to write in that way as in any 
other. When Lear says, 

" Down, thou climbing sorrow, 
Thy element 's below," — 

the critics of the last century, walking through 
the clipped verdure and formal alleys of the Gar- 
den of Eloquence, point out, with dignified com- 
placency, that " here is a most remarkable proso- 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 223 

popoeia." So there is, if they must have it so. 
But it comes from Shakespeare's pen as a matter 
of course ; as if no other thought, no other words, 
could have occurred to him on that occasion. 
And what cared he what Homer or what Virgil 
would have said > But it is always thus with him. 
Unlike other great writers, he does not seem to 
scatter his riches with a lavish hand : they drop 
from him like fatness from the clouds of heaven ; 
as if, with the intellectual riches of a god, he had 
a godhke serenity in their possession and their 
bestowal. 

Notwithstanding Shakespeare's copiousness of 
thought and affluence of imagery, no remark 
upon his style could be more erroneous than that 
so often made by his critics, that he does not re- 
peat himself It has even been attempted to 
regulate his text upon this assumption. But 
Shakespeare did not hesitate to repeat his own 
thoughts or words, or, for that matter, those of 
other writers, when to do so served his present 
purpose. Examples are scattered all through his 
plays. For instance, the same feeling is expressed 
in nearly the same words by characters as radi- 
cally unlike as King Lear, Justice Shallow, and 
Othello. The first two in their feebleness, the 
last in constraint, revert to their former prowess. 
Lear says : 

** I have seen the day when with my good biting falchion 
I would have made them skip." 



224 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

Shallow : 

" I have seen the time with my long sword I would have made 
your four tall fellows skip like rats." 

Othello : 

" I have seen the day 

When, with this little arm and this good sword, 

I have made my way through more impediments 

Than twenty times your stop." 

In no respect was Shakespeare's art classical. 
He was essentially a Goth ; and his style corre- 
sponded entirely to the character of his mind. 
English is a Gothic language ; yet there can be 
classical English, as we have been shown by Addi- 
son and Goldsmith. In the former of these eminent 
writers we find the perfection of ease, clearness, 
harmony, and dignity. So we do in Shakespeare, 
except that some passages, from compression of 
many thoughts, from neglect of elaboration, and 
sometimes from corruption, lack clearness. But 
it is not thus that Shakespeare's style is to be 
defined. It is not to be defined at all ; it is a 
mystery. Addison's sound sense, the eminently 
graceful character of his mind, and his lambent 
humor, were individual qualities which marked 
his thought ; but as to his style, it can be easily 
analyzed ; its elements can be detected and their 
proportions declared. But you cannot take cer- 
tain qualities of style and combine them in cer- 
tain proportions, by certain rules, and make your 
Shakespeare's mixture. A nameless something, 
not grace, not harmony, not strength, which yet 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 22 q 

mingles with them all in Shakespeare, would be 
lacking. Addison's perfect style has been perfect- 
ly imitated. There have been men, there might 
be many men, who could produce, not what would 
properly be called an imitation of it, but the thing 
itself But the man has never yet written, except 
Shakespeare, who could produce ten lines having 
that quality which, for lack of other name, we call 
Shakespearian. 

It is, however, not only in this nameless charm 
and happy audacity that Shakespeare differs from 
those writers of our language whose styles may be 
regarded as models of correctness. He is often 
undeniably incorrect, in consequence partly of the 
syntactical usage of his day, which upon minor 
points had not yet attained a complete logical con- 
formity to the very principles then recognized, and 
partly of his own neglect to revise carefully that 
which he wrote so fluently. Such of his occasional 
errors as are not of the former kind appear exclu- 
sively in his plays : they are not found in the poems 
which he carefully prepared for perusal. Perhaps 
it is safe to say that it is not among those great 
imaginative writers who are affluent in thought and 
free in style that we are to look for a grammati- 
cally faultless use of language ; but rather among 
didactic writers, who are constipated and precise, 
and who occupy a place in the second or third 
grade, or one yet lower. The pages of Walter 
Scott, who in imagination and richness of re- 

10* o 



226 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

source stands nearer (if any can be near) to Shake- 
speare than any other writer in our language, 
are marked with instances of inaccuracy of style, 
as well as of statement, which we pass by almost 
unnoticed as we are borne along upon the strong, 
swift current of his narrative. But whatever may 
be the general truth in this respect, it is certain 
that in Shakespeare's plays we find not a few 
such passages as the following, which there is 
no reason for doubting came as we have them 
from his pen. 

" No more of this, Helena : go to, no more, lest it be thought 
you rather affect a sorrow than to have." 

All 's Well, &c., Act I. Sc. i. 

" Achievement is command, ungain'd beseech." 

Troihis and Cressida. 

"He hath, and is again to cope your wife." 

Othello, Act IV. Sc. i. 

These would serve as fit school exercises in 
faulty syntax, of which alone they are examples. 
But in that grand rejoinder to the desperate 
Othello, in which Emilia, noble though not un- 
tainted soul, rises to the serenest height of con- 
scious self-sacrifice, — 

" Thou hast not half the power to do me harm 
As I have to be harm'd," — 

the grandeur and the pathos of this truly woman- 
ly utterance reach our hearts through a confusion 
not only of syntax, but of logic ; " power " being 
used in the first part of the sentence in the sense 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 227 

of ability, and understood in the latter in the 
sense of capacity, — inaccurately, because power 
is an attribute of action, not of reception. But 
the hand which should undertake to rectify these 
errors in construction by rule and plummet would 
find that it had strength enough only to bring 
down the noble though irregular structure in a 
ruin that would overwhelm the rash endeavor 
with disgrace and ridicule. 

There is, however, a vagueness in some pas- 
sages of Shakespeare's poetry which is inten- 
tional, and which is a result of the highest art, — 
a vagueness which magnifies an image, generally 
of terror, that would be belittled by being drawn 
with sharper outline. This is a trait of Gothic 
art, and is not peculiar to Shakespeare, or indeed 
to poetry ; for it finds its place in Gothic archi- 
tecture. Schiller has been much praised, and 
somewhat over-praised, for his use of the indefi- 
nite neuter pronoun " it " in his ballad. The Diver^ 
to indicate the fabled polypus, which, however, he 
immediately describes.* But Shakespeare, who 
seems to have been beforehand with most modern 
poets in all their happiest devices, had in this 
efiect anticipated and surpassed Schiller, and had 
availed himself of our indefinite dread of unknown 
horrors in the recesses of the sea, not only, like 
Schiller, to leave upon the mind a vague image of 

* "It saw — a hundred-armed creature— its prey." 

Sir E. Bulwer Lytton's Translation. 



228 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

the unknown creature itself, but to heighten our 
dread of, and aversion to, unnatural crime. How 
indefinite the comparison when Lear exclaims : 

" Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, 
More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child, 
Than the sea-monster ! " 

What is the sea monster ? Yet how much more 
of horror is suggested by that definite indefinity, 
than if the comparison had been in terms to a 
crocodile or a kraken ! * And in other modes, 
and for other reasons than the heightening of an 
image, Shakespeare is sometimes vague, and in 
expressing abstract thought or simple emotion 
purposely indefinite. He is aided in his effects 
of this kind by a singular felicity in framing 
phrases which convey ideas by mere suggestion, 
and which at once fill mind and ear with a satis- 
faction, the reason for which escapes close analy- 

* I will here remark that the happy comparison made by 
Swift, so often quoted, and always as his, of those able and well- 
informed men who are yet hesitating speakers, to a full church, 
which, from its very fulness, is emptied more slowly than if the 
congregation were a small one, was taken by the Dean from 
Shakespeare. And it shows how little the Lucrece is read, that 
this appropriation has not been pointed out before. 

" Her maid is gone, and she prepares to write, 

First hovering o'er the paper with her quill. 

Conceit and grief an eager combat fight ; 

What wit sets down is blotted straight with will ; 

This is too curious good, this blunt and ill : 
Much like a press of people at a door 
Throng her inventions, which shall go before." 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 22Q 

sis. What, for instance, is the exact meaning of 
the last two lines of this passage from one of 
Macbeth's soliloquies ? 

" Present fears 
Are less than horrible imaginings. 
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, 
Shakes so my single state of man, that function 
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is 
But what is not." 

Yet there is no doubt that it leaves upon the 
mind just the impression which Shakespeare in- 
tended to make ; and that probably the intelli- 
gent reader of sensitive organization but uncriti- 
cal mind is placed by it more in sympathy with 
the poet's mood than some of those who have 
harder heads and subtler intellects. So as to the 
phrase " blood-boltered Banquo," it may be safely 
doubted if any modern reader on first meeting 
with the passage knew positively the meaning of 
" boltered " ; but it may be as safely believed that 
few readers, except those who read a play as the 
mathematician did, to see what it all proves, did 
not receive from the sound of the phrase, and a 
vaguely attributed sense, the impression intended 
by the poet. 

Akin to this power in Shakespeare is that of 
pushing hyperbole to the verge of absurdity ; of 
minghng heterogeneous metaphors and similes 
which, coldly examined, seem discordant ; in short, 
of apparently setting at naught the rules of rhet- 



230 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

oric, without paying the penalty by the critics in 
such case made and provided. Thus, when Cle- 
opatra, about to send a message to Antony, says, 

" Give me ink and paper. 
He shall have every day a several greeting, 
Or I 'II unpeople Egypt," — 

how needlessly extravagant is the hyperbole in 
regard to the number of messengers, three hun- 
dred and sixty-five of whom would have conveyed 
a several greeting to Antony every day for a year ! 
But it is really reflective in its effect ; it is a reve- 
lation of Cleopatra's character ; and as a measure 
of her feeling toward her lover, and of her con- 
sciousness of absolute power, it is in keeping. 
Of both mixed metaphor and apparently discor- 
dant simile, where is there a more flagrant seem- 
ing example than the following passage from the 
Tempest, the beauty of which, as a whole, is tran- 
scendent 1 

" The charm dissolves apace : 
And as the morning steals upon the night, 
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses 
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle 
Their clear reason." 

Now if the beauty and propriety of metaphor 
depended upon the exact, the material and me- 
chanical conformity of images, what a hotchpot 
would be here ! Indeed, a learned and generally 
judicious critic of the last century has selected 
this very passage as a shocking example of mixed 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 23 1 

metaphor, in which " so many ill-sorted things are 
joined that the mind can see nothing clearly." 
And if it were necessary to the beauty and the 
force of the metaphor that we should picture to 
ourselves a figure of the dawn stealing upon a fig- 
ure of the darkness, and at the same time melt- 
ing it up in a pot, and that we should see a like- 
ness between this process and the equally incom- 
prehensible one of senses rising up and running 
after uninstructed fumes which were casting a 
mantle over reason, it need hardly be said that 
the passage would be ridiculous. But not thus 
does the mind receive the impression of a met- 
aphor. And in this passage, as in hardly any 
other in the range of poetry, is the tender glory 
of the dawning day gently dispelling the dark- 
ness that covers the face of nature brought up 
before the mind ; and it is to this image, not 
sharply defined, but seen as if in a mental twi- 
light, that Prospero compares his charm's dissolv- 
ing. It should ever be remembered, too, in our 
judgment of a poet's, and especially a dramatic 
poet's, fancies and expressions of emotion, that 
they are to be looked upon from his plane of vis- 
ion. If we do not rise with him to the point to 
which he has risen, much that has to his eye due 
proportion will to us seem monstrous. To one 
who stands upon a mountain-top, objects, the size 
and opposite character of which strike the eye of 
him who remains upon the plain, are dwarfed into 



232 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



insignificance or blended into harmony. There 
is in a play, which, though not the greatest pro- 
duction of Shakespeare's genius, displays more 
completely than any other all the qualities of his 
style, — The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, — a 
passage which in its resistless sweep and majestic 
imagery is not surpassed by any other of his writ- 
ing, and which is an extreme example at once of 
the vagueness, the mingling of metaphor, and the 
extravagance with which he could dare to write, 
and splendidly succeed. Northumberland, after 
several speeches, during which he, with rapidly 
rising emotion, is led to the certain knowledge of 
his son Hotspur's death, enraged with grief, thus 
closes his outbreak of wrath and sorrow : — 

" Now bind my brows with iron, and approach 
The ragged'st hour that time and spite dare bring 
To frown upon the enrag'd Northumberland. 
Let heaven kiss earth : now let not nature^s hand 
Keep the wild flood confin'd ; let order die ; 
And let this world no longer be a stage 
To feed contention in a ling'ring act ; 
But let one spirit of the first-born Cain 
Reign in all bosoms, that, each heart being set 
On bloody courses, the rude scene may end, 
And darkness be the burier of the dead ! " 

How big this is with strong emotion ! how tur- 
bulent with grand and multitudinous impersona- 
tion ! The very abstract subjects are all endowed 
with life and passion. Yet no clear images are 
left upon the mind ; the attributed actions are in 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 233 

themselves preposterous, impossible ; and the im- 
precation of the end of all things upon occasion 
of the death of one man in battle shows, by at- 
taining it, that there can be a limit even to ex- 
travagance. But what reader, except a rhetori- 
cian of the last century, ever attempted to form an 
image of a personified heaven kissing a person- 
ified earth ? How great a loss would be the knowl- 
edge of what the wild flood is which nature keeps 
confined ! Who ever supposed that Shakespeare 
meant that a stage could properly be said to feed 
anything, much more feed contention ? The truth 
is, that in such passages as that in question, when 
they are the work of a hand strong enough to 
carry the reader with the writer, the mind does 
not take the personifying words in their strict 
sense. That sense, as in the phrases, " Let heaven 
kiss earth," " let order die," " to feed contention," 
is only suggested, and gives a certain color and in- 
tensity to expression. And in Northumberland's 
speech, the quick opposing changes of impersona- 
tion perturb the passage with a stir of words and 
clash of thought which corresponds to and portrays 
the strong, deep agitation of the speaker's soul. 

Shakespeare mixed not only metaphors, but 
metaphors and plain language. He unites even 
the material and the spiritual ; and yet his image 
loses neither strength nor beauty, because its head 
is of gold and its feet of clay. When Hamlet 
says. 



234 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

" and bless'd are those 
Whose blood and judgment are so well co-mingled 
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger 
To play what stop she please," 

what a union of weight and edge is given to the 
passage by the welding of the physical idea of 
blood with the moral idea of judgment ! Yet the 
rhetoricians have forbidden the banns of such 
unions. But the period as a whole, no less than 
the first member of it, is obnoxious to their denun- 
ciation. For the last half is as apparently incon- 
gruous with the first, as the elements of the first 
are with each other. How can the commingling 
of blood and judgment make a pipe ? But Shake- 
speare did not write for men who read after this 
mole-eyed fashion. Nor did he here mean that 
blood and judgment make a pipe. Blood and 
judgment make the man, and the man is then 
compared to a pipe in the hands of fortune. This 
is discovered not by an analysis, however rapid, 
but apprehended at once by the understanding of 
every reader who can and does admit the entrance 
of more than one idea into his mind at the same 
time. So in Hamlet's speech, against which there 
was an outcry all through the last century, — 

" To take arms against a sea of troubles," — 

Shakespeare does not put his moody prince in 
the attitude of a military Mrs. Partington, using 
arms instead of broom against the ocean. It is 
against the troubles that the man is to struggle, 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 2T,K 

and it is the troubles which are to be ended. Had 
Shakespeare written a " host of troubles,'^ or any 
equivalent phrase, the line would have been within 
the capacity of a poet of the second rank ; but by 
writing " sea," he with one word brings to mind the 
tumultuous, ever succeeding woes, which seeming 
innumerable, like the multitudinous seas, some- 
times overwhelm the soul. It is to his faculty of 
combining the expression of an impressive truth 
or a genuine human feeling with fancies which by 
themselves would seem extravagant, that Shake- 
speare's style owes its peculiar and never failing 
charm, — a faculty which in its action transcends 
all law, except that of its own being. He has, 
in the height of his hyperbole, and even in the 
occasional inflation of his imagery, a keeping 
which makes his expressions seem those of simple 
though elevated nature. He possesses, also, in its 
highest manifestation, the correlative power of 
giving, by the reflected light of his intellect, beau- 
ty to that which is in itself repulsive. Not only 
passion, guilt, and woe, but even inhumanity and 
baseness, are presented to us so tempered and 
elevated through the medium of his genius, that 
we are not wounded or repelled by the picture, 
while we mourn over, or condemn, or even loathe, 
that which it represents. We may say of his ge- 
nius, as Laertes says of the crazed Ophelia, 

" Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, 
She turns to favor and to prettiness." 



236 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



Thus Shakespeare furnishes us with the very 
language in which we can pass critical judgment 
upon himself ; so that it is possible that the best 
and completest expression of his genius could be 
culled from the works which that genius has pro- 
duced. 

Shakespeare, from the height to which he 
soars, can overlook and disregard that which af- 
fronts lowlier eyes ; or, by the universal solvent 
of his genius, he can compel the union of ele- 
ments whose natural repugnance resists less po- 
tent alchemy. Yet, with no material detriment to 
his fame, it may be admitted that precisians and 
purists, and all who admire, as Sampson fought, 
only when the law is on their side, can find a true 
bill of extravagance against him. For what was 
justly said of Plato, that "if he had not erred he 
would have done less," is quite as applicable to 
the great dramatic poet as to the great philoso- 
pher ; and the allowance may be more reasonably 
made in the case of Shakespeare. If we will have 
high-sounding poetry, we must risk an occasional 
flight beyond the bounds of reason. Genius has 
produced some bombast which is really grand, and 
some tinsel that will shine forever. 

Much more objectionable than such extrava- 
gance as that into which Shakespeare sometimes, 
though rarely, fell, are the opposite faults of style, 
an elaboration of nice conceit, and a proneness to 
verbal quibbling, into which he was led by a con- 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 237 

formity to the taste of his period. These trivial 
blemishes, easily discernible, were just of the kind 
to provoke the censure of the last century's crit- 
ics, who were never tired of pecking at Shake- 
speare for the readiness with which he sprang at 
an opportunity for a pun ; and there can be no 
doubt that some fine passages of his poetry 
are less purely beautiful than they would have 
been, were they not spotted with this labored use 
of words in a double sense. This fault is like 
those fripperies of dress which are generally an 
ungraceful and elaborate affectation in the fashion 
of a day, and which it is better indeed that the 
painter of a picture in the grand style should omit 
from the costume of his figures. But should a 
great master introduce them, who that can com- 
prehend and rightly admire the essential parts of 
his work will waste much time in grieving .? Of 
the kindred fault, which did not take the form 
of an absolute pun, but which is hardly less offen- 
sive, the Lucrece furnishes the following perfect 
specimen : — 

" Even here she sheathed in her harmless breast 
A harmful knife, which thence her soul unsheathed." 

Conceits like this, which abound in all depart- 
ments of the literature of the Elizabethan age, 
are mere labored verbal antitheses corresponding 
to parallel antitheses of thought. The humorous 
side of this conceit in style is a pun, in which 
there is correspondence of words but incongruity 



238 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



of thought. The development of taste has taught 
us that in serious writing these antitheses are im- 
pertinent ; but the pleasing surprise of a certain 
lack of pertinence, which yet seems pertinent, 
forms no small ingredient in our enjoyment of 
wit. Of this "kind of wit, no less than of that sub- 
tler comic quality which we call humor, Shake- 
speare has shown himself in Falstaff the match- 
less master. And thus we find that his most 
objectionable and most noticeable fault is nearly 
related to one of his most exquisite and charming 
graces. All Shakespeare's faults of the kind just 
noticed are found united in the following passage 
from Heniy the Fifth, the most offensively thus 
deformed in all his works : — 

" A many of our bodies shall, no doubt, 
Find native gi'aves, upon the which, I trust, 
Shall witness live in brass of this day's work ; 
And those that leave their valiant bones in France, 
Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills, 
They shall be famed ; for there the sun shall greet them. 
And draw their honors reeking up to heaven. 
Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime, 
The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France. 
Mark, then, abounding valor in our English ; 
That, being dead, like to the bullet's grazing. 
Break out into a second course of mischief, 
Killing in relapse of mortality." 

This is not the nodding of Homer : these sins 
were committed with open eyes. Such indeed 
was Shakespeare's vivacity of mind, that he rarely 
drowsed over his work. But upon one or two oc- 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 23Q 

casions he slumbered outright ; as when he made 
Coriolanus say that his "throat of war" should, 
if he flattered the people, become like "the virgin 
voice which babies lulls asleep," which is a rare, 
almost an isolated instance of his misuse of epi- 
thet. It is interesting to know that, while he 
conformed to the fashion of his day in this matter 
of conceits and quibbles, he saw how petty and 
injurious it was, and visited it with open con- 
demnation. In Twelfth Night, after making the 
Clown quibble for three speeches, to Viola's be- 
wilderment, upon two words, he makes the same 
character exclaim : " To see this age ! A sentence 
is but a cheveril glove to a good wit. How quick- 
ly the wrong side may be turned outward ! " To 
which Viola replies, " Nay, that *s certain ; they 
that dally nicely with words may quickly make 
them wanton." This is one of the very few pas- 
sages in his plays which may safely be accepted as 
a mere expression of his own opinions. 

Another mark which his period set upon Shake- 
speare's style — his reference to subjects and his 
use of words which are excluded from polite socie- 
ty by modern notions of decorum — may be passed 
by with slight attention. Within certain wide 
limits, which seem to be set by nature, decency in 
word and deed is determined absolutely by cus- 
tom. What is decent in one age or under certain 
circumstances, may be indecent in another age or 
under other circumstances. The defying of cus- 



240 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



torn is the essence of indecency. This is nota- 
bly exemphfied in the history of language. For 
in language the tendency is to the degradation 
and consequent exclusion of words from polite 
usage, while the idea maintains its place. Thus 
we do not hesitate to speak, if it be necessary to 
do so, of the stomach or bowels ; but in Eliza- 
beth's time the best-bred people designated those 
parts of the body by words the first of which is 
now heard only among boys, and the second 
never among decent people. It has been before 
remarked, that Shakespeare is less obnoxious to 
our modern code in this respect than any other 
dramatic writer of his period. He has some pas- 
sages which are not to be read in general soci- 
ety now-a-days ; but there is no moral taint in 
any of his works, — nothing that can debauch the 
mind of the pure and innocent. It is only as a 
concession to the fancies of the weak-minded, or 
as a provision for the needs of those who find it 
agreeable to read Shakespeare aloud in mixed 
company, that Bowdler's mutilations are at all 
defensible. 

But one fashion of his day, at Shakespeare's 
conformity to which we must chiefly rejoice, was 
that of using blank verse instead of rhyme in dra- 
matic compositions. His choice doubtless went 
with his conformity; but that he yielded in this 
respect to fashion is plain from the facts that his 
earUer plays abound in rhymed passages, a great 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 24I 

part of one of them, The Comedy of Erivrs, being 
in complete or alternate rhyme, and that he used 
blank verse only in his plays. Blank verse had 
been slowly growing in favor with our English 
poets ever since Surrey used it for his translation 
of the fourth book of the -^neid, forty years be- 
fore Shakespeare entered upon his career. At 
the latter period it was coming into vogue upon 
the stage ; and Shakespeare, who in all that he 
wrote to set forth as poetry chose rhyme, soon 
became in his dramas the greatest master of Eng- 
lish heroic measure. Not much can be said, and, 
if there could, not much need be said, in an at- 
tempt to appreciate Shakespeare's genius, of the 
beauty of his versification. Criticism can do no 
more than record its various and surpassing beau- 
ties. The mere structure of verse is mechani- 
cal. It can be, it has been, made perfect by rule. 
Much good sense has been written in lines com- 
posed of five feet of two syllables, with accent 
duly disposed and tastefully and correctly varied, 
which are unexceptionable verses, quite as perfect 
as any that Shakespeare ever wrote ; but they are, 
most of them, weariness to the flesh, while his 
delights our ears forever. The reason of this dif- 
ference it is impossible to set forth. We can no 
more say why it is, than we can say why, when 
one composer writes a succession of notes which 
follow each other in perfect conformity to the rules 
of music, and the canons of taste, as well as the laws 
II p 



242 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

of composition, we may say with Sly, "A very ex- 
cellent piece of work, would 't were done ! " and 
when Mozart writes conforming to no other laws, 
he ravishes our souls with melody. Power over 
sound, whether of words or musical notes, is a 
personal gift, which, unlike other personal gifts, 
such as wisdom, logical power, imagination, the 
mastery of form, as in sculpture and architecture, 
or of color, as in painting and decoration, is ex- 
ercised (within certain general limits) purely ac- 
cording to the personal fancy, the spontaneous 
and intuitive preference of the possessor. Thus, 
for instance, the sculptor and the painter must 
represent something in nature, by the form or 
color of which they are limited : the architect 
must adapt his structure, not only to certain me- 
chanical and aesthetic laws, but to the purpose for 
which his building is intended. But the musician 
has no such limit to the exercise of his faculty. 
Within himself alone he finds both guide and mo- 
tive for the flow of his melody and the progres- 
sion of his harmony. He adapts his melody to 
his words, if he write to words ; but, within the 
limitation of poetic rhythm, that determines not 
its form, only its spirit. And so the poet in the 
sensuous expression of his verse is guided only 
by his own sense of what is fit and beautiful. 
We can see that he attains this purpose by the 
variation of his pauses, the balance of his sen- 
tences, and his choice and arrangement of words 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 243 

in regard to sound. But why he does this as he 
does it, we cannot tell ; nor could he tell himself. 
Haydn could give no other reason for writing a 
certain passage in a certain way, than that he 
thought " it would sound best so." We can test 
one of Shakespeare's characters by the laws of our 
moral nature ; but we have no law, except those 
before mentioned, which refer to the rudiments 
and mechanism of the art, by which we can test 
the sensuous beauties of his poetry. Except in 
his songs, he wrote almost entirely in one kind of 
verse ; and he wrote that as he willed, his varia- 
tions of style in this respect resulting only from 
the greater or less freedom which he allowed him- 
self, guided only by his innate, exquisite sense of 
the beautiful. The dissertations upon his versifi- 
cation written by critics of past generations, who 
discovered that he had furnished us admirable in- 
stances of different kinds of verse with very im- 
posing names, trochaic dimeter brachycatalectic, 
for instance, are in my judgment only lamentable 
instances of the waste of learning and of ingenu- 
ity. The freedom of dramatic writing at his day 
allowed him to be very irregular in his verse. He 
had no criticism to fear (it cannot be too con- 
stantly kept in mind), and the success of his plays 
was not with a public who read, but with an audi- 
ence who listened. Therefore he allowed himself 
defective and redundant lines, the alternation of 
verse with prose, and of rhyme with blank verse ; 



244 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



conscious that, so long as the dialogue ran easily 
and naturally on, the audience would concern 
themselves with the situations, the thoughts and 
feelings of the personages, indifferent to niceties 
of versification, which indeed only a reader could 
detect. 

In respect to the strict laws of versification, 
the dramatic poet of the days of Elizabeth was a 
chartered libertine. This is plain enough to any 
critical reader. But contemporary testimony is 
not lacking to the entire freedom from rhetorical 
restraint in this respect, as in all others, with 
which the Elizabethan dramatists labored. 

" Too popular [i. e. vulgar] is tragic poesie, 
Straining his tiptoes for a farthing fee ; 
And doth beside in nameless numbers tread ; 
Turbid iambics flow from careless head." 

Bishop Hall's Satires. 

Shakespeare availed himself of this freedom to 
the full ; and we can see that as he grew older 
he allowed himself greater license ; the effect of 
which relaxation was counterbalanced and modi- 
fied by his greater mastery of the material in 
which he worked and his more refined percep- 
tions of beauty. The plays which we know were 
his latest productions, such as The Winter s Tale, 
Coriolanus, and Henry the Eighth, are notably 
freer, free almost to carelessness, when compared 
with The Two Gentlemen of Verona and King 
Richard the Second for instance, which we know 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 245 

were of his early writing. In some of the Roman 
plays and in King Henry the Eighth he reaches 
the point of almost failing to mark his verse by 
any caesural or final pause whatever ; very often 
allowing the place of the last accent to be filled 
by a syllable, frequently a monosyllabic word, 
which cannot be accented. 

" The king's majesty 
Commends his good opinion of you to you, and 
Does purpose honor to you no less flowing 
Than Marchioness of Pembroke." 

Henry VIII. , Act I. Sc. 3. 

" Sir, I desire you to do me right and justice, 
And to bestow your pity on me ; for 
I am a most poor woman and a stranger." 

Ibid., Sc. 4. 

" Because that now it lies in you to speak 

To th' people ; not by your own instruction. 

Nor by the matter that your heart prompts you. 

But with such words that are but voted in 

Your tongue," &c. 

Coriolanus, Act III. Sc. 2. 

" My name is Caius Marcius, who hath done 

To thee particularly and to all the Volsces 

Great hurt and mischief; thereto witness vtay 

My surname, Coriolanus Only that name remains : 

The cruelty and envy of the people. 

Permitted by our dastard nobles, who 

Have all forsook me, hath devour'd the rest ; 

And suffered me by th' voice of slaves to be 

Whoop'd out of Rome. Now, this extremity 

Hath brought me to thy hearth : not out of hope — 

Mistake me not — to save my life ; for if 

I had fear'd death,, of all the men i'the world 

I would have 'voided thee." 

lb.. Act IV. Sc. 5. 



246 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

"You are they 

That made the air unwholesome, when you cast 

Your stinking, greasy caps, in hooting at 

Coriolanus' exile." 

lb., Act IV. Sc. 6. 

It is true that the rhythm of all modern poetry 
depends merely upon accent, and that the English 
language has among its happy distinctions that 
of containing no word which is unfit for poetry. 
But the facility given by these traits is shared in 
the first instance by all modern poets, in the sec- 
ond by all English poets. Yet of all English, as 
well as of all modern poets, Shakespeare, in re- 
spect to his versification, as well as in all other 
respects, is the supreme master. The rhythm of 
his verse and the cadence of his periods is deter- 
mined by an exquisite sense of the beauty of ver- 
bal form, working with an intuitive, though not 
unconscious, power in the adaptation of form to 
spirit. 

One point in regard to the history and struc- 
ture of our language is particularly worthy of no- 
tice in connection with the present topic. As the 
rhythm of English verse is dependent solely upon 
accent, a permanence of accent in pronunciation 
is necessary, not only to the continued enjoyment 
of verse during many generations, but actually to 
its continuing to be verse ; while the completest 
change in the vowel sounds of the words of which 
a verse is composed will not deprive it of its 
rhythmical, and scarcely of any musical quality. 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 247 

Shakespeare's poetry is no less verse and no less 
beautiful to the Englishman born north of the 
Tweed, who calls himself a Lowland Scot, or to 
the Englishman born in Ulster, who calls himself 
an Irishman, than to the native of London or Bos- 
ton. Yet each of the two former, however well 
educated, will pronounce the words of which that 
verse is composed, with vowel sounds, and in a 
measure with an articulation, peculiar to himself, 
and different from that of the educated man born 
in the Old England or the New. But the latter 
themselves give to a very large proportion of 
words vowel sounds quite different from their 
common forefathers, for whom Shakespeare wrote, 
and whose pronunciation was more like that of 
the so-called Irishman than that which they have 
adopted. These facts make it the more worthy of 
note that the changes of accent in our language 
since its maturity, about three hundred years ago, 
have been so extremely few as to leave it, to all 
intents and purposes, the same in this respect that 
it was in the Elizabethan era ; although the chan- 
ges in many vowel and some consonant sounds 
have been so great, that, if the wits who met at 
the Mermaid could hear their descendants of to 
day read their writings, they would surely smile 
and wonder, even if they could understand. Ac- 
cent furnishes to the body of our language its 
bones and articulations, and preserves its form and 
determines its movement, although its softer and 



248 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



apparently more vital parts are changed by time 
and circumstance. To this characteristic -we owe, 
and our posterity will owe, the inestimable advan- 
tage of reading Shakespeare's poetry with no less 
pleasure than it gave to his contemporaries. 

Like in the irresponsibility and absoluteness of 
its operation to the faculty of melodious versifi- 
cation is that faculty which we call fancy, touch- 
ing Shakespeare's exercise of which somewhat has 
necessarily been said already. Fancy is defined 
by Johnson as "the power by which the mind 
forms to itself images of things, persons, or scenes 
of being," and he gives imagination as its syno- 
nyme and first definition ; by Webster, as " the 
faculty by which the mind forms images or repre- 
sentations of things at pleasure " ; by Worcester, 
as " the faculty of combining ideas " ; and some 
metaphysicians, attempting to draw a distinction 
between fancy and imagination, have attributed to 
the former faculty the power of forming im.ages or 
representations of things in the mind, — to the lat- 
ter, that of combining and modifying them. If 
these definitions were correct and sufficient, fancy 
could not with propriety be considered as a trait 
of style, which is in poet, painter, or musician the 
mode of expression. It would belong to the sub- 
stance of an author's work, — that which style 
expresses. But the definitions in question, to 
which all others known to me conform with un- 
essential variation, must be set aside as express- 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 249 

ing neither the idea of fancy which is presented 
by our best writers of any age, nor that which has 
determined the general use of the word among 
intelHgent people. 

This is not the place in which to go into ex- 
tended dissertation upon the characteristic traits 
and differences of fancy and imagination ; but it 
maybe briefly said, that if "fancy" were ever cor- 
rectly used as a synonyme of "imagination," which 
is more than doubtful, or as the name of a crea- 
tive image-forming faculty, that usage has long 
since passed away ; and that the needs of intelli- 
gent people have effected a distinction between 
the two words similar in kind to that which has 
been made between " talent " and " genius." Car- 
lyle, for instance, is celebrated as a writer of vivid 
and powerful imagination ; but no person of ordi- 
nary discrimination would speak of fancy as one 
of his characteristic mental traits. So the style 
of A Midsummer Night 's Dream is peculiarly rich 
and brilliant in fancy ; but, except in the person- 
ages of Puck and the clowns, it is not distin- 
guished among Shakespeare's plays for imagina- 
tion, which as exhibited in his works finds its 
highest manifestation in King Lear, Macbeth, and 
The Tempest. 

Imagination works upon the substance or ma- 
terial of a writer of fiction or history, producing 
his personages, with their traits, actions, and sur- 
roundings ; fancy, upon the style in which he en- 
n* 



250 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



forces and adorns his thoughts. And thus Sheri- 
dan, satirizing an opponent, said that he drew upon 
his imagination for his facts, not upon his fancy. 
In truth the sense of the world has for ages re- 
garded the fancy as a faculty so peculiarly indi- 
vidual, and having to do with that which passes 
within a man's own mind, that it has applied the 
word " fancy " to love between the sexes,* to any 
personal predilection, to an eccentric notion, a 
dress adopted by an individual, or a fashion pre- 
vailing among a few. The poor, abandoned girl 
still has her fancy-man, the costumer makes fancy 
dresses, even the baker fancy cake ; and every one 
has his own fancies, for which he is held alto- 
gether irresponsible. But what need to go about 
for definition and illustration, when Shakespeare 
himself, all-discerning, has given them .? Miranda 
says to Ferdinand, 

" I would not wish 
Any companion in the world but you ; 
Nor can imagination form a shape 
Besides yourself to like of." 

And Theseus tells Hippolyta, in a famous passage 
of A Midsummer NigMs Dream, that " imagina- 
tion bodies forth the forms of things unknown." 
On the other hand, the King of Navarre in Loves 
Labour's Lost calls an eccentric personage, who 

* " Tell me where is fancy bred ? " — Mer. of Veji. 
" In maiden meditation, fancy free." — M. N. Dr. 
"All fancy-sick she is and pale of cheer. — Ibid. 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 2^1 

"hath a mint of phrases in his brain/' Armado, 
" this child of fancy " ; and Holofernes, a sound 
and acute critic, though a pedant, speak of " the 
odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of inven- 
tion," which furnish not the substance, but " the 
elegance, facility, and gojden cadence of poesy " ; 
and he sends the love-born Orlando throusrh the 
forest of Arden, "chewing the cud of sweet and 
bitter fancy." It is quite impossible to make 
fancy and imagination change places in these pas- 
sages ; or to suppose that the poet had in mind 
faculties of which one, fancy, furnishes representa- 
tions of things which the other, imagination, com- 
bines and modifies. In brief, imagination is that 
creative faculty of the mind by which images of 
men and things, and their relations, are conceived 
and brought forth with seeming reality. It is a 
correlative of faith, which is the substance of 
things hoped for and the evidence of things not 
seen. Fancy is the faculty which illustrates, en- 
riches, and adorns a person, a thing, or a state- 
ment of fact or truth, by association, by compari- 
son, and by attributed function or action. Thus 
sexual love is rightly called fancy, because the 
loved is endowed by the lover with all that charms 
that lover in the other sex, though often having 
few or none of those endearing qualities. And 
thus Ariel is a creature of Shakespeare's imagi- 
nation ; but when he makes Ferdinand say of 
Ariel's song, 



252 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

" This music crept by me upon the waters, 
Allaying both their fury and my passion," 



he exhibits in one of its most entrancing manifes- 
tations his exquisite and peerless fancy. So when 
the Duke in Twelfth Night exclaims, 

" O when mine eyes did see Olivia first, 
Methought she purged the air of pestilence," 

Shakespeare at once exhibits his own fancy as a 
poet and portrays the fancy of a lover. 

Never did intellectual wealth equal in degree 
the boundless riches of Shakespeare's fancy. He 
compelled all nature and all art, all that God had 
revealed, and all that man had discovered, to con- 
tribute materials to enrich his style and enforce 
his thought ; so that the entire range of human 
knowledge must be laid under contribution to il- 
lustrate his writings. This inexhaustible mine of 
fancy, furnishing metaphor, comparison, illustra- 
tion, impersonation, in ceaseless alternation, often 
intermingled, so that the one cannot be severed 
from the other, although the combination is clear- 
ly seen and leaves a vivid impression upon the 
mind, is the great distinctive intellectual trait of 
Shakespeare's style. In his use of simile, im- 
agery, and impersonation, he exhibits a power to 
which that of any other poet in this respect can- 
not be compared, even in the way of derogation ; 
for it is not only superior to, but unlike, that which 
we find in any other. He very rarely institutes a 
formal comparison, — rarely uses the word " like," 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 253 

which is so common with other poets. Nor does 
the condensation of simile called metaphor, or 
the attribution of will called impersonation, fur- 
nish a medium quite sufficient for his fancy. He 
does not set off his thought and his image against 
each other, or formally illustrate one by the other. 
He fuses a thought or a feeling and an image to- 
gether. They are not even twins, but a single 
birth ; thought giving soul to image, and image 
embodying thought. When Milton, in a passage 
of justly celebrated beauty, would exhibit the 
bashfulness of a modest, new-made wife, he makes 
Adam say, 

" To the nuptial bower 
I led her blushing like the morn." 

But Shakespeare makes Posthumus say that in 
like circumstances Imogen showed 

*' A pudency so rosy the sweet sight on 't 
Might well have warmed old Saturn." 

In the epic poet there are two ideas, not only dis- 
tinct, but severed. The dramatist presents one 
which suggests two. Again, Milton, in a passage 
yet more beautiful than the last quoted from him, 
describing the dawn, says, 

" Now Morn, her rosy steps i' th' eastern clime 
Advancing, sowed the earth with orient pearl." 

This is nearer, especially in the rosy steps ; but 
still there is a severance between morn and the 
eastern clime, between morn and the orient pearl. 



254 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



Shakespeare, describing the same event, says, in 
his compact way, 

" Morn, in russet mantle clad, 
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill." 

This is the production of no acquired art, but of 
an inborn faculty. Shakespeare displayed the 
fulness of its strength in his earliest plays. Who 
has not already thought of Romeo's announce- 
ment of the dawn, — 

" Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day 
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-top " .'* 

But this is mere description of natural phenom- 
ena. Shakespeare's peculiar power in this respect 
is the vividness with which his fancy illustrates 
thought, action, and emotion. The highest exer- 
cise of that faculty appears in the following pas- 
sage, which has never been surpassed in the 
grandeur of its imagery or the felicity of its illus- 
tration. Queen Margaret, taunting York after 
the battle of Sandal Castle with his disappointed 
ambition, says, 

*' Come, make him stand upon this mole-hill here 
That raught at mountains with outstretched arms, 
Yet parted but the shadow with his hand." 

Yet this passage is from a speech in The True 
Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, which was 
written when Shakespeare was but about twenty- 
five years of age, and an unknown dramatist, work- 
ing in company with others. He transferred the 
speech bodily to his Third Part of King Henry 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 255 

the Sixth. It is of his writing. Its mere excel- 
lence does not alone stamp it as his ; but no other 
poet has made such a use of imagery. 

It has been already remarked, that the richness 
of Shakespeare's style is due in great measure 
to the variety of his allusions and the extended 
knowledge from which he draws his illustrations. 
His knowledge of man and of nature was chiefly 
intuitive, although it was developed and perfected 
by observation and reflection. But so intimate 
is the acquaintance which he exhibits with certain 
arts and occupations, and certain departments of 
learning, that on this hypotheses have been framed, 
and supported by argument, that he passed some 
of his early years in the professional acquirement 
of the knowledge which he afterward put so dex- 
terously to use. A dangerous foundation for such 
a supposition in regard to any author of quick 
observation and a lively fancy, — most dangerous 
with regard to Shakespeare. Johnson's dictum, 
that Nature gives no man knowledge, is, to say 
the least, too general in its terms to be true in all 
its bearings. It is hardly less safe to limit the 
power of genius in expressing emotions by the 
bounds of individual experience, than to assume 
that it cannot describe actual occurrences which 
it has not witnessed, or places which it has not 
seen. And although it is clear that genius can- 
not furnish its possessor with knowledge of facts, 
or with technical knowledge, men whose faculties 



256 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



do not rise to the plane of genius may, by powers 
of keen observation, quick perception, retentive 
memory, and ready combination, acquire in the or- 
dinary intercourse of Hfe, without special study, a 
technical knowledge which, up to a certain point, 
shall be real, and, dexterously deployed, seem 
thorough. It is not derogatory to Shakespeare's 
genius, but rather the reverse, to believe that in 
his works much of what appears to be the fruit 
of special knowledge was acquired in this man- 
ner. Of all men known to the history of litera- 
ture, he seems to have had the most subtle and 
sensitive intellectual apprehension. What he cas- 
ually heard, and what he saw by side glances, he 
seems to have understood by intuition, and to 
have made thenceforth a part of his intellectual 
resources. The very management of the ship in 
The Tempest, which satisfies naval critics, may 
have been the fruit either of casual observation, 
or of what men of letters call " cram," rapidly as- 
similated by his genius. 

As to book knowledge it is certain that, although 
he was not what scholars call a scholar, he had as 
much learning as he had occasion to use, or even 
more. His plays and poems teem with evidence 
that he devoured books, and that he assimilated 
what he read with marvellous celerity and com- 
pleteness. Even when we can trace in his po- 
etry the very passages of the authors to whom he 
was indebted, they reappear from the mysterious 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



257 



recesses of his brain transmuted and glorified. 
When we see what it was that he absorbed, and 
how he reproduced it, we are reminded of Ariel's 
song : — 

" Full fathom five thy father lies ; 

Of his bones are coral made ; 
Those are pearls that were his eyes ; 

Nothing of him that doth fade 
But doth suffer a sea change 
Into something rich and strange." 

His early plays are full of allusions to ancient 
classic literature, showing no great learning in- 
deed, but a mind fresh from academic studies 
such as they were. But he soon discontinued 
this school-boyish habit. The fulness of his brain 
with his own thoughts left no room for second- 
hand lumber. He imbibed the spirit of Greek 
and Roman history, through whatever channel he 
received it, although he sometimes violated chro- 
nology and costume to the annoyance of some 
critics hardly worthy to have been his readers. 
Where, even in Plutarch's pages, are the aristo- 
cratic republican tone and the tough muscularity 
of mind which characterized the Romans so em- 
bodied as in Shakespeare's Roman plays } Where, 
even in Homer's song, the subtle wisdom of the 
crafty Ulysses, the sullen selfishness and con- 
scious martial might of broad Achilles, the blun- 
dering courage of thick-headed Ajax, or the 
mingled gallantry and foppery of Paris, so vividly 
portrayed as in Troilus and Cressida? What 



258 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS, 



matter is it that he committed such an error in 
costume as to make Aufidius say to Coriolanus, 
that he joyed more at welcoming him a friend and 
ally of Corioli, than when he first saw his wedded 
mistress bestride his threshold, — the fact having 
been that the newly married wife of the Latin race 
was carefully lifted over the threshold on her first 
entrance to her husband's house ? What, that he 
made Hector cite Aristotle, who lived eight hun- 
dred years after the siege of Troy ? He did not 
care ; nor did his hearers ; and why should we 
be troubled ? Must our little learning so cripple 
our imagination ? Shakespeare's genius could not 
have taught him the relations which Greek litera- 
ture bore to that of Rome ; but he having ac- 
quired that knowledge, his intuitive perception of 
higher relations taught him what function the 
Greek language would perform for an accom- 
plished Roman orator, statesman, and philoso- 
pher ; and his dramatic imagination of the scene 
when Caesar fell into a fit after having refused the 
crown, showed him Cicero speaking Greek, so 
that "those that understood him smiled at one 
another and shook their heads." But when, in 
Henry the Fifth, the Bishop of Exeter makes his 
comparison of government to the subordination 
and harmony of parts in music, — 

" For government, though high and low and lower 
Put into parts, doth keep in one consent, 
Congruing in a full and natural close 
Like music," — 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 25Q 

it were more than superfluous to seek, as some 
have sought, in Cicero De Repiiblica, the origin of 
this simile ; for that book was lost to Hterature, and 
unknown except by name, until Angelo Mai dis- 
covered it upon a palimpsest in the Vatican, and 
gave it to the world in 1822. Cicero very proba- 
bly borrowed the fancy from Plato ; but it was not 
Shakespeare's way to go so far for that which lay 
near at hand. Music, and particularly vocal part- 
music, was much cultivated by our forefathers in 
Shakespeare's time ; and he seems to have been a 
proficient in the art. The comparison is one that 
might well occur to any thoughtful man who is 
also a musician ; but it is not every such man who 
would use it with so much aptness and make it 
with so much beauty. 

No less noticeable than this display of knowl- 
edge, more or less recondite, yet no less easy to 
understand, is Shakespeare's use in illustration of 
natural phenomena which must have been beyond 
his personal observation. Of all negative facts in 
regard to his life, none perhaps is surer than that 
he never was at sea ; yet in Henry the EightJi, de- 
scribing the outburst of admiration and loyalty 
of the multitude at sight of Anne Bullen, he says, 
as if he had spent his life on shipboard, 

" Such a noise arose 
As the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest ; 
\ As loud, and to as many tunes." 

We may be very sure that he made no special 



26o SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

study of natural phenomena ; and indeed no con- 
dition of his Ufe seems surer than that it afforded 
him neither time nor opportunity for such studies. 
Yet in the following lines from his sixty-fourth 
sonnet, an important geological fact serves him for 
illustration : — 

" When I have seen the hungry ocean gain 
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, 
And the firm soil win of the watery main. 
Increasing store with loss and loss with store " 



Where and how and why had Shakespeare ob- 
served a great operation of nature like this, which 
takes many years to effect changes that are per- 
ceptible ? Yet we may be sure that Shakespeare 
had this knowledge in no miraculous way, though 
his possession of it might be remarkable to the 
many who did not possess it themselves. For we 
find that his knowledge of that which he could 
not learn of his own soul, which could teach him 
everything with regard to man, but nothing with 
regard to material nature, was limited to what he 
had observed, and to the knowledge of his time, 
even in the simplest matters. He knew that Cice- 
ro would be likely to veil a sententious comment 
upon an important political event in Greek ; he 
knew that the shrouds of a ship howled dismally 
in a tempest ; he even knew that a compensating 
loss and gain are going on between the great 
waters and the continents ; but he did not know 
what every lad fit to enter college now knows, 
and what it would seem that any intelligent man 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 26 1 

who considered the subject must have discovered 
for himself, that the sparks produced by flint and 
steel are minute pieces of steel struck off and 
heated to redness by friction. Like all his con- 
temporaries, he supposed that the fire was in 
the flint. Thersites says that Ajax's wit "lies as 
coldly in him as fire in a flint, which will not 
show without knocking." 

But the limits of Shakespeare's knowledge did 
not mark the scope of his genius, and his igno- 
rance or his learning is of small account in esti- 
mating the quaUty of his poetry, or the truth 
and interest of his dramatic conceptions. Would 
either of two passages from which lines have just 
been quoted have been more impressive, if Aufid- 
ius had spoken of his new-married wife being 
lifted over his threshold, or if Shakespeare had 
known that steel was burned by collision with 
flint ? It matters little what naturalists and schol- 
ars think of the material which Shakespeare used 
for the illustration of his thought, and less whence 
those materials were derived. Of no more impor- 
tance is it that he has transferred thoughts from 
forgotten wastes to his own blooming pages. 
What matter that he has taken some from Lilly ? 
It is he alone who makes those thoughts admired. 
Those which he did not take, the world has quite 
forgotten. The glory is not in the cloud, but in 
the eternal light that falls upon the fleeting exha- 
lation. Even in regard to the special knowledge 



262 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

which is most strikingly exhibited in Shakespeare's 
writings, that of the law, of how little real impor- 
tance is it to establish the bare fact that Shake- 
speare was an attorney's clerk before he was an 
actor. Suppose it proved, what have we learned ? 
Nothing peculiar to Shakespeare, but merely 
what was true of a great number of other young 
men, his contemporaries. It has a naked mate- 
rial relation to the other fact, that he uses legal 
phrases oftener than any other dramatist or poet ; 
but with his plastic power over those grotesque 
and rugged forms of language it has naught to do 
whatever. That was his inborn mastery. Legal 
phrases did nothing for him ; but he did much for 
them. Chance cast their uncouth forms around 
him, and the golden overflow from the furnace of 
his glowing thought fell upon them, enshielding 
and glorifying them forever. The same fortune 
might have befallen the lumber of any other craft ; 
it did befall that of some others, — the difference 
being one of quantity and not of kind. The cer- 
tainty that Shakespeare had been bred in the law, 
would it even help us to the knowledge of his 
life, — of what he did for himself, thought for him- 
self, — how he joyed, how he suffered, what he 
was .'* No more would it help us to understand 
his genius. 

Whatever Shakespeare may have learned, he 
did not learn his dramatic art, in which he had, 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



263 



not only no instructor, but no model. By dramatic 
art is not here meant the principles which guided 
him in the construction of his plays. In that he 
had teachers who were also his examples. The 
form and the action of all his dramas, whether 
comedies, histories, or tragedies, were determined 
by laws over which he had, or at least exercised, 
no control. At the time of his arrival in London 
the English drama had attained a recognized, if 
not an established form, which was not an imita- 
tion of an elder type or the invention of an indi- 
vidual, but an outgrowth of the national charac- 
ter. As the physical traits and moral qualities of 
men are determined by those of their forefathers, 
and the growth which produced the political insti- 
tutions of a country upon which such institutions 
have not been forcibly imposed can be traced 
through its history, so the form, and in a certain 
measure the spirit, of the English drama (in this 
respect, as in all others, so unlike those of France 
and Spain) were the result of centuries of sponta- 
neous development. The English drama sprang 
from English soil* Shakespeare accepted this 
form with entire acquiescence, and during the 
whole of his career confined the exercise of ge- 
nius within its limitations. Not only was the 
form of plays thus determined, but the manner of 
writing them. It was the settled practice of the 
dramatic writers of that day, most of whom were 

* See the Account of the English Drama, &c., pp. 315, et seq. 



264 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



connected with one theatre or another, either as 
actors or retained playwrights, to take plots wher- 
ever they could find them, — from popular novels, 
old plays, or well-known passages of history, — and 
to work these up as quickly as possible into an ef- 
fective play, which, by its story and its characters, 
would interest the public. Preference was given 
to the plots of old plays or the stories of novels 
which already had a hold upon popular favor. In 
those days the theatre supplied in a great meas- 
ure, even to those who could read, the place now 
filled by literature. This we know from the fact 
that readers and books were then comparatively 
scarce ; but it also appears from the very con- 
struction of the plays of that period. If the sto- 
ry of the play were fictitious, the people wished 
to enjoy the story, as well as the presentation of 
the characters. They were not bound up, as we 
are, in sentiment, character, style, and stage effect. 
They liked to have a complete narration of all the 
events of the story, without reference to dramatic 
cHmax ; and therefore, after that climax had been 
reached, they did not resent, as we do, a continu- 
ation of the action. They were even pleased with 
a relation by some of the characters of the occur- 
rence of events not represented, but connected 
with the story. Thus, for instance, the dramatic 
interest of Hamlet ceases with the death of the 
prince, when our managers very properly drop the 
curtain ; but the audiences of Shakespeare's day 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



265 



liked to have Fortinbras and the English ambas- 
sadors come in and tell the fate of Rosencranz 
and Guildenstern, and to hear that Hamlet would 
be buried in princely style and with a funeral ora- 
tion by Horatio. So also, as few could then read 
the history of their own country, they liked to see 
history, to have it "lively presented" to them 
upon the stage. They asked in these historical 
entertainments for the spirit and the essential 
facts and leading characters of the period repre- 
sented, rather than details or strict chronological 
accuracy. They seem to have been quite indif- 
ferent as to a gradual culmination of the action ; 
although, of course, it was natural to expect that 
the end of the play should coincide with the ac- 
complishment or defeat of some great purpose. 
To supply this v/ant, and guided only by these 
demands, Shakespeare wrote his Histories. In- 
deed, almost every play that bears his name bears 
also evidence of his conformity to the require- 
ments of the audience for which he wrote, as well 
as to the practices of contemporary playwrights. 

To another well-known custom of his day, that 
of engaging two or more writers upon one play, 
he also conformed. He did so certainly at the 
beginning and the end, if not occasionally during 
the whole of his career.* He rewrote old plays, 

* See the Introduction to the Taming of the Shre^v, Titus An- 
drottiacs, Romeo and Juliet, and Essay on Henry the Sixth, in the 
author's edition of Shakespeare's Works. 
12 



266 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

got his plots out of popular novels, and even took 
English history just as he found it in the Chron- 
icles, and Greek or Roman history just as it was 
told in North's Plutarch, appropriating the very 
language of the chronicler or the translator, — as 
sometimes he did that of an old playwright, with a 
difference, — but what a difference ! — and wrote in 
company or alone, just as best suited the theatre's 
purpose and his own convenience. It is worth 
while to bring to mind these well-established facts 
in regard to Shakespeare's dramatic writing, be- 
cause it is the fashion of some critics to regard him 
as writing, like Sophocles or Euripides, to a listen- 
ing nation, conscious that its fame was partly in- 
volved in his productions, the judgment of which 
was worthy of the grave consideration of gravest 
men, and because much superfine subtlety and in- 
genuity have been exhibited in tracing his pur- 
poses and in providing him with psychological the- 
ories, according to which he gave certain traits to 
certain personages, and led them through such and 
such experience, when in fact he was but following 
the old play or the old story to which he had gone 
for the framework or the material of his drama. 
Even his historical pieces, which all the evidence 
shows were written at haphazard as far as re- 
gards their order, or at least only with the public 
taste in view, have been solemnly resolved into 
tetralogies and cycles, with a central thought and 
a ruling purpose, as if Shakespeare meant in writ- 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



267 



ing them to give the world a philosophy of his- 
tory. This indeed can be extracted from them 
by the thoughtful reader for himself; but only be- 
cause they are an idealized picture in little of real 
life. And what wonderful psychological knowl- 
edge has one of Shakespeare's later critics found 
in the bringing Romeo upon the scene enamored 
of Rosaline, to have this passion supplanted by the 
purer and tenderer one for Juliet ! which, on the 
contrary, critics of the last century regarded as a 
great fault in the amorous Veronese's character. 
But the truth which these critics did not know is, 
that in this transfer of affection Shakespeare mere- 
ly followed the novel and the poem to which he 
went for his plot. There he found the incident of 
Romeo's earlier love ; there, too, he found the Old 
Nurse, and even her praise of Paris to Juliet, and 
her underrating of Romeo after his banishment, 
with her counsel to the second marriage ; all of 
which have been lauded as exquisite and subtly 
drawn traits of nature. Which, again, indeed they 
are ; and Shakespeare could doubtless have in- 
vented them : but the truth is that he found them. 
So in the tale which he dramatized and called 
Othello he found lago, with his craft and his spon- 
taneous and almost superfluous fiendishness, the 
reason and the right of which have been the occa- 
sion of so much profound psychological discussion. 
There is ground for believing the sudden changes 
in the feelings of lovers and tyrants in some of 



268 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

Shakespeare's plays, and such unaccountable acts, 
for instance, as Valentine's willingness to resign 
his mistress to Proteus, would be accounted for, 
though perhaps not explained, by the discovery of 
some lost play or novel. In plays thus written as 
daily labor by a man whose sole object in writing 
was to please a promiscuous audience, — by a play- 
wright who worked merely as one of a company 
or partnership, his part of the business being to 
furnish words for others to speak, who composed 
sometimes in joint authorship, and who worked 
over the old material which lay nearest to his hand 
and was best suited to his money-making purpose, 
always saving time and trouble as much as pos- 
sible, — in such plays, so produced, what folly to 
seek, as some have sought, a central thought, a 
great psychological motive ! Shakespeare, like all 
men of creative genius, "builded better than he 
knew," knowing right well, however, what, though 
not how greatly, he was building. But although 
genius destined to empire may seek asses and find 
a crown, genius cannot have a purpose great or 
small unconsciously. For will is the soul of pur- 
pose ; and from all that we know of Shakespeare 
and his circumstances, and all that can be ex- 
tracted from his plays without torture, we may be 
sure that the great central thoughts and inner 
motives which have been sought out for his va- 
rious dramas by critics of the German school, 
could he but come back and hear them, would 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



269 



excite only his smiling wonder. In the mere con- 
struction of his dramas, although Shakespeare 
sometimes displays great skill, not only in the 
working of the plot, but in the manner in which 
he conformed his genius to the taste and the 
dramatic fashions of his day, he exhibits nowhere 
a conformity to principles of art unknown before 
his era. 

Every thoughtful reader of Shakespeare must 
see that his pecuHar power as a dramatist lies in 
his treatment of character. The interest which 
distinguishes his plays, as plays, from all others, 
is that which centres in the personages, in their 
expressions of thought and emotion, and in their 
motives and modes of action. This was his dra- 
matic art, and this it was in which he had neither 
teacher nor model. For at the time when he began 
to write, character, properly so called, was almost, 
if not quite, unknown either to English literature 
or even to that of the Latin races. In English 
dramatic literature Marlowe alone had attempted 
character, but in a style extremely coarse and 
rudimentary. The Italian and French novelists 
who preceded Shakespeare, including even Boc- 
caccio himself, interest by mere story, by incident, 
and sentiment. Their personages have no char- 
acter. They are indeed of different kinds, good 
and bad, lovers, tyrants, intriguers, clowns, and 
gentlemen, of whom some are grave and others 
merry. But they are mere human formulas, not 
either types or individuals. 



2/0 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



It has been much disputed whether Shake- 
speare's personages are types or individuals. 
They are both. Those which are of his own 
creation are type individuals. So real are they 
in their individuality, so sharply outlined and 
completely constructed, that the men and women 
that we meet seem but shadows compared with 
them ; and yet each one of them is so purged 
of the accidental and non-essential as to be- 
come typical, ideal. He made them so by unit- 
ing and harmonizing in them a variety of traits, 
all subordinated to, yet not overwhelmed by, one 
central, dominating trait, and by so modifying 
and coloring the manifestation of this trait that 
of itself it has individuality. Othello and Leon- 
tes are both jealous, and unreasonable in their 
jealousy, as all the jealous are. But the men 
are almost as unlike as Lear and Hamlet ; and 
their jealousy differs almost as much as the fierce 
madness of the old king from the young prince's 
weak intellectual disorder. lachimo and lago 
are both villains, who would pitilessly ruin a 
wife's reputation for their selfish ends ; but the 
former is a rude and simple villain, who seems to 
lack the moral sense ; the latter, one who has a 
keen intellectual perception of that moral beauty 
which he neither possesses nor heartily admires. 
Shakespeare's personages are thoroughly human, 
and therefore not embodiments of single traits or 
simple impulses, but complicated machines ; and 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 271 

the higher their type, the more complex their or- 
ganization. He combines in one individual and 
harmonizes qualities apparently incongruous, his 
genius revealing to him their affinities. Thus 
Angelo is no mere hypocrite, but really a precis- 
ian. He is sincere in his austerity, and has pride, 
or rather an inordinate secretly enjoyed vanity, in 
his power to restrain his strong passions in the 
face of weak temptation. But he is intensely 
selfish, as most precisians are, and there comes a 
time when his passions and a great temptation 
join their forces. Before these his artificial re- 
straint gives way, and he consciously sets out 
upon a course of monstrous crime, which he yet 
shrinks from whispering in the solitude of his 
own chamber. lago, another hypocrite, on the 
contrary, dallies with his villany, places it in vari- 
ous lights, and stands off, smiling admiration upon 
the honest fellow who is working death and ruin. 
Yet lago was a good soldier and a brave man, 
and, had he been promoted instead of Cassio, 
would have made the better Heutenant to Othello, 
for the very lack of a certain weak amiability 
which beset Cassio off the battle-field. His vic- 
tim, poor Othello, who in his relations toward 
women is one of the most delicate and sensitive 
of men, in the bitterness of his soul pays his 
wife's own maid as he leaves the former's bed- 
chamber ; not either to reward or to offend Emilia, 
but that he may torment his own soul by carrying 



2/2 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



out his supposition to its most revolting conse- 
quences. 

It is this complication of motive which causes 
the characters of Shakespeare's personages to be 
read differently by different people. This variety 
of opinion upon them, within certain wide and 
well-determined limits, is evidence of the truthful- 
ness of the characters. Not only does their com- 
plex organization give opportunity for a different 
appreciation of their working, but, as in real life, 
the character, nay, the very age, of those who pass 
judgment upon them is an element of their repu- 
tation. Not only will two men of equal natural 
capacity, and equally thoughtful, form different 
opinions of them ; but the judgment of the same 
man will be modified by his experience. Unlike 
the personages of the world around us, some of 
whom pass from our sight while others come for- 
ward, and all change with the lapse of time, those 
of Shakespeare's microcosm, by the conditions of 
their existence, remain the same. But our view of 
them is enlarged and modified by advancing years. 
As we grow older, we look upon them from a higher 
point, and the horizon of our sympathy broadens. 
We lose little and we gain much. For manhood's 
eye, ranging over its wider scope, finds that the 
eminences which were the boy's bounds of admira- 
tion do not pass out of sight, but become parts of 
a grander and more varied prospect, while dis- 
tance, in diminishing their importance, casts upon 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 273 

them the tender light of that happy memory 
which ever Hngers upon pure and early pleasures. 
But, as in real life again, Shakespeare's charac- 
ters, during their mimic existence, depend upon 
and develop each the other. We see how they are 
mutually worked upon and moulded. And in this 
interdependence and reciprocal influence, more 
than in mere structure of plot, consists the unity 
of Shakespeare's plays as organic wholes. His 
personages are not statuesque, with sharp, un- 
changing outlines. His genius was not severe 
and statuesque, as for instance Dante's was. His 
men and women are notably flexile ; and not only 
so, but they seem to have that quality of flesh 
and blood which unites changeableness with iden- 
tity, — as a man's substance changes, and his 
soul grows older, year by year, and yet he is the 
same person. It is not only the story in Shake- 
speare's dramas which makes progress, but the 
characters of the personages. Lear, Romeo, Mac- 
beth, Othello, are, as the phrase is, not the same 
men at the end of the play as at the beginning. 
Their experience has modified their characters. 
Yet they are the same, though qiianto nmtatiis ! 
This it is which exhibits Shakespeare's supreme 
peculiar power. What he did, for instance, for 
lago, was not to make him a villain, but to pro- 
vide the ready-made villain with a soul. He 
worked out in poetry a great psychological prob- 
lem. Given such and such hellish deeds, what 

12 * ^ 



274 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



kind of a man is he who does them ? and how 
does he think, and feel, and act ? So as to the 
incident of Romeo's sudden transfer of his love 
from Rosaline to Juliet ; Shakespeare found that 
in the old story. But it was he who, in using that 
incident and in working out the lover's character, 
drew a distinction not indicated in the story, and 
which until then had, I believe, not been drawn 
in any work of imagination, and made Romeo's 
first love that fierce desire for possession into 
which sometimes the whole strength of a man's 
nature is diverted, while his second is that union 
of passion, tenderness, respect, and self-devotion 
which is the highest type of love between the 
sexes. Shakespeare indicates the nature of this 
distinction in the quaint phrase of the chorus at 
the end of the first act. 

" Now old desire doth in his death -bed lie, 
And young affection gapes to be his heir." 

The same distinction is drawn between the two 
loves of the Duke in Twelfth Night, the earlier of 
which was love at first sight. He says of his first 
meeting with Olivia, 

" That instant was I turned into a hart ; 
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, 
E'er since pursue me." 

And when he finds his mistress has bestowed 
upon Cesario the love she refused to him, he turns 
upon her in wrath, and threatens the object of her 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 275 

affection. Romeo is enamored of Rosaline, as 
Orsino is of Olivia ; so he is enamored of Juliet ; 
but in the first passion of neither is there any ele- 
ment of self-devotion. It does not fill, although it 
usurps, his entire nature ; and therefore it is easily- 
driven out by one which has all its strength, and 
what it has not, — completeness. This distinction 
is much more carefully made in Twelfth Night 
than in Romeo and yidiet ; partly because of the 
different courses of the two plots, but partly also 
because the comedy was the fruit of maturer 
powers than those which produced the tragedy. 

Shakespeare made souls to his characters : he 
did not give them his own. It is now the most 
commonly recognized truth in regard to him, that 
he is a self-oblivious poet. But this is not true of 
him without important qualification. In his son- 
nets, whether they were written in his own person 
or another's, he was not oblivious of self On 
the contrary, his own thoughts, his own feelings, 
constantly appear. He pours out his own woes 
with a freedom in which he equals, but with a 
manliness in which he far surpasses, Byron. It is 
as a dramatist that he is self-oblivious ; and he is 
so to a degree too absolute, it would seem, for the 
ever-conscious people of the world to apprehend. 
Else we should not hear, as we continually do 
hear, an opinion or a course of conduct sustained 
with an air of triumph by the citation of Shake- 
speare's opinion in its favor. For there is hardly 



2/6 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



a course of conduct or an opinion upon a moral 
question which cannot be thus supported. Shake- 
speare disappeared in his personages ; and it is 
they who speak, and not their creator. The value, 
nay, the very meaning, of what his creatures 
say, must be measured by their characters and 
the circumstances under which it is spoken. It 
is not William Shakespeare who says, even in 
jest, that a perfect woman is fit only "to suc- 
kle fools and chronicle small beer," — it is that 
coarse, jeering villain, lago. Nor is it he who 
says that "to be slow in words is woman's only 
virtue," — it is a cynical clown called Launce. It 
was not Shakespeare who called the first Tudor 
"shallow Richmond." We may be sure that no 
one knew better than he that the man who be- 
came Henry the Seventh was deep, prudent, and 
far-seeing, although not greatly wise. It was 
Richmond's enemy, Richard, who said that ; and 
said it not to himself, but to one of his own fol- 
lowers. Let no one who delights in rich gar- 
ments complacently think that Shakespeare com- 
mends a habit as costly as the purse can buy. 
That advice was given by a shrewd old courtier, 
at a time when sumptuous apparel was the recog- 
nized sign of a certain social standing. 

Attempts have been made, on the one hand, to 
show that Shakespeare was an infidel, and, on the 
other, that he was a Roman Catholic. Both might 
have been equally successful. A Bishop has, by 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 277 

ingenious and elaborate collation of passages of 
the player's works, set forth certain religious prin- 
ciples and sentiments derived from the Bible as 
Shakespeare's. But by a like process just the 
opposite might have been shown with equal cer- 
tainty. In this regard, as in all others, what 
Shakespeare wrote was the outgrowth of charac- 
ter and circumstance. Religious subjects could 
not be treated with more solemnity than by some 
of his personages, as the reader of Henry the 
Eighth, Richard the Second^ and Measure for Meas- 
itre will remember ; nor, on the other hand, could 
the most imposing dogmas of divinity be touched 
with more daring or more disrespectful hands 
than are laid upon them in King Henry the 
Fourth, Cymbeline, Macbeth, and Much ado about 
Nothing. 

It is thus upon every question. Because a 
usurper, wishing to build up in himself a belief 
that he rules by the grace of God, says, 

" There 's such divinity doth hedge a king 
That treason can but peep to what it would, 
Acts little of his will," 

it no more follows that Shakespeare believed in 
the absolute and divine right of kings, than, be- 
cause one of Jack Cade's followers lays it down 
that the command, labor in thy vocation "is as 
much to say as let the magistrates be laboring 
men, and therefore should we be magistrates," 
it follows that he was a radical democrat. For 



278 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



he made both the usurper and the demagogue. 
Shakespeare's entire absorption in his personages, 
and his substitution of their consciousness for his 
own, are perhaps most remarkable in Antony and 
Cleopatra, in which the passion of the queen for 
her new lover is manifested with a feminine con- 
sciousness of sex which approaches the miracu- 
lous. In the fourth scene of the second act of this 
play Cleopatra addresses to a messenger from Italy 
a few words which, although but an eager demand 
for his news, are of such intense sexuality that in 
these days the passage, although really harmless, 
is not quite quotable out of its setting. Her sex 
and that of him of whom she is enamored are con- 
stantly in this woman's mind and on her tongue. 
And here I will remark that in this tragedy there 
is not one worthy character ; which is evidently 
by the author's design. Shakespeare's dramatic 
instinct kept even Octavia more out of sight than 
she is in the story which he followed, because he 
knew that otherwise Cleopatra might become des- 
picable, and so lose all her interest. He meant 
that we, no less than Antony, should abandon our- 
selves entirely to the fascinations of the serpent of 
old Nile, and that we should sympathize with his 
wanton queen in her sneer at " the married wo- 
man," and resent her " still conclusion." I confess 
that, when I read Antony and Cleopatra, I look with 
cold aversion upon Octavia, — Octavia, beautiful, 
wronged, and noble. In her uneasy jealousy of 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 270 

her married rival Cleopatra inquires minutely as 

to her personal traits, and among other questions 

asks, " Is she shrill-tongued or low ? " In this 

query Shakespeare either indicates a very subtle 

knowledge on the part of Cleopatra, or uses her 

to express one of his own strong personal tastes. 

For a sweet voice, one of woman's chiefest charms, 

is yet one of the last she thinks of enumerating 

either in her own attractions or another's. But 

Shakespeare makes Coriolanus meet his wife with 

the greeting, " My gracious silence ! " and we all 

remember poor broken-hearted Lear sobbing over 

his dead Cordelia, 

" Her voice was ever soft, 
Gentle, and low, — an excellent thing in woman." 

Indeed, from all of Shakespeare's plays we can 
gather little more as to his personal tastes than 
that he had a great aversion to high voices, false 
hair, and painted cheeks in women. Yet this is 
an indication, not of his individuality, but of his 
manhood. 

It would seem as if in all Shakespeare's thickly 
peopled plays we might at least find one charac- 
ter which he meant should represent his own. 
But the longer and the closer our study of those 
plays, the more clearly it appears that of all his 
creatures none think his thoughts or express his 
preferences, except his fools. And perhaps the 
Fool in Ki7ig Lear more nearly represents Shake- 
speare's tone of mind and view of life than any 



28o SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

other of his personages. All Shakespeare's fools 
are wise ; but this one has wisdom enough to 
teach prudence to men of the world, and to set up 
a college of philosophers. A tinge of sadness, 
almost of melancholy, tempers all the sallies of 
his wit. He is as true as Kent and as tender as 
Cordelia. Comparison to him were a compliment 
to any other man than Shakespeare. His use 
of the Jester exhibits in a striking manner two 
marked traits of Shakespeare's method ; one, the 
ease with w^hich he adapted himself to circum- 
stances and bent his mighty genius to the little 
needs of his profession ; the other, the profusion 
with which he poured out his thoughts and the 
impartiality with which he bestowed his labor. 
He seems never to have husbanded his resources, 
or thought any work beneath his dignity. It is 
a poor workman who complains of his tools ; and 
Shakespeare, finding the fool in possession of an 
established place upon the stage, and thus essential 
to the popularity of his plays with a mixed audi- 
ence, instead of rebelling against or fretting at his 
necessity, made him the vehicle of his sentiment, 
his fancy, his practical wisdom, and even of his 
pathos. That modification of the Jester called 
the Clown appears even in Hamlet, although not 
until the last act. We may not unreasonably 
suppose that, had Shakespeare's motive in writing 
his plays been to develop a "central thought," 
he would have composed such a play as Hamlet 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 28 1 

without clowns. But the new tragedy comes to 
be talked over in the green-room, and Burbadge 
says : " Why, Master Shakespeare, this is an ex- 
cellent play, — a right masterful tragedy. But 
methinks that some of our people will not know 
what your prince would be about ; and moreover, 
although the play be somewhat overlong, there is 
no part for the Clown. People when they come 
to the Black-friars expect to see Kempe or Armin, 
above all them that stand in the yard ; and I 
need not tell so thrifty a fellow as thou art, that 
pence count in the long run as well as shillings." 
And old Philip Henslow, if he happen to be pres- 
ent, says : " Right, Master Burbadge, I put out lit- 
tle money on a play that hath in it neither Clown 
nor Jester." Then Shakespeare takes his manu- 
script home again, and adds the Grave-diggers ; 
working them in without remorse and with little 
trouble. Thus it was that Shakespeare labored. 
In the mere construction of his plays, although 
he sometimes exhibited great skill, as for instance 
in The Tempest, Othello, and The Merchant of 
Venice, he neither conformed to nor elaborated 
any principles of art not known before he entered 
upon his career. 

Shakespeare has minor personages, but no 
slighted characters. They all have individuality, 
and he will waste on a messenger a sentiment or 
a simile that would grace a hero's tongue or add 
dignity to a royal proclamation. The pcrsonnage 



282 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

prostatique of the pseudo classic French stage has 
no place in Shakespeare's drama. This complete- 
ness of his minor characters is the more remark- 
able, because he has whole scenes which were 
manifestly written merely to meet the exigencies 
of stage management. Such for instance is the 
second scene of the third act of OtJiello. It con- 
sists of but six lines, and merely gives a glimpse of 
Othello as he goes to walk upon the works. But 
it separates two others, in both of which Cassio 
appears, at the end of the first and the beginning 
of the second ; and it tells us that lago is to meet 
Othello upon the works, from which they after- 
ward enter together, the latter already made a 
little sensitive upon the subject of his lieutenant's 
nearness to his wife. And in The Merry Wives 
of Windsor the first scene of the fourth act, in 
which Sir Hugh Evans plays pedagogue to Wil- 
liam Page, has nothing whatever to do with the 
plot, but it serves to separate the scene in which 
Falstaff receives his second invitation from that 
which exhibits the entertainment to which he is 
invited. These are mere contrivances to preserve 
the appearance of probability in action, which, 
when it has its formal name, is called the unity of 
time and place. It would have been well, for in- 
stance, in this respect, if a scene could have been 
thrown in between the first and second of the 
first act of AlVs Well that Ends Welly which pre- 
sent one of the most striking examples of Shake- 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



283 



speare's disregard of that unity. For although 
one is at Rousillon and the other at Paris, Ber- 
tram and Parolles appear in both; the latter's 
entrance before the King in his palace being sep- 
arated by only seven short speeches from his exit 
at Rousillon to accompany Bertram on his jour- 
ney. But of how small importance is such dis- 
crepancy ! No dramatic interest is broken by it ; 
no essential propriety violated. It would be open 
to no objection in a story ; and in regard to their 
construction English plays are only acted stories. 
But in fact Shakespeare, as we have just seen, was 
put to shifts in common with the merest journey- 
man playwright that ever wrote to-day to get him 
bread to-morrow. Yet these straits only minis- 
tered occasion to his genius. He went to his 
work like a faithful servant ; but he did it like a 
king. The very superfluous scene in TJie Meriy 
Wives of Windsor, just cited, one of the least 
important its author wrote, bears unmistakable 
marks of his hand, and for its character and hu- 
mor will always be read with pleasure. 

Hardly less remarkable than Shakespeare's vig- 
orous and vivid style of dramatic portraiture are 
the range of his subjects and the variety of his 
characters. He left no department of his art un- 
tried, and sounded the dramatic lyre from its low- 
est note to the top of its compass. The same 
hand that struck from it the woes of Lear and 
the troubled harmonies of Hamlet's soul drew 



284 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



forth also its most fantastic strains, and left us in 
The Comedy of Errors a farce equally extravagant 
and jocular. No other writer has so run through 
the scale of humanity. In this respect it is safe 
to say that Shakespeare will never be surpassed, 
because he left no important type of character 
untouched. From Hamlet to Abhorson, from 
Imogen to Mistress Quickly, what a descent ! 
Yet between these extremes the full gradation is 
maintained. Nay, the lower extreme is passed. 
Caliban bridges the gap between the human crea- 
ture and the brute ; and Crab stands upon the 
other side, with cur-like thanklessness for a char- 
acter as sharply drawn as his master's. 

Whence did Shakespeare draw the characters of 
such a multitude of various and well-defined per- 
sonages } From models t Did he, as some would 
have it, keep watch upon the world around him, 
and, seizing upon the individuals that suited his 
purposes, put them into his dramas } Great paint- 
ers have thus filled their canvases ; and drama- 
tists of high rank have manifestly drawn their 
characters from people whom they saw around 
them. Hence it is that we find the same face 
doing duty for like character in the works of paint- 
ers from Raphael to Leech, so that we recognize 
their pictures by traces of some lovely woman 
or some strongly marked man whose traits have 
seized upon their imaginations. Hence, that 
throughout Beaumont and Fletcher's and Jon- 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



285 



son's plays, and much more in those of inferior 
dramatists, the men and women who fulfil certain 
functions, good or bad, have an unmistakable re- 
semblance. But among Shakespeare's personages 
there is not this familiar likeness. There is no 
likeness whatever, except in the style of their por- 
trayal. These are plainly from the same mint, but 
do not, like those, seem to have been struck with 
the same die. Gustave Dore is the only painter 
who shows a similar fecundity. Had Shakespeare, 
working as he did merely to make money, drawn 
his characters from models, he surely must have 
fallen into a habit which would have saved him 
much labor and have satisfied his audience. He 
would have had his stock of models ; and those, 
worked into each new plot as they were needed, 
speaking his fancy, his wisdom, his wit, and his hu- 
mor, and dressed in different costume, would have 
filled the eye and ear of his public. It is true that 
he must have observed ; he was probably the most 
observant of men, as well as the most reflective ; 
and his works had of necessity the advantage of 
his observation, as well as of his reflection and his 
imagination. Nor did the greatness of his mind 
absolve it from the law of development and pro- 
gress common to humanity. Although wise in his 
youth, — and his early plays show wisdom, — he 
must, by the very exercise of his faculties and the 
habit of introspection, have grown wiser as he 
grew older. But if we may judge by the ruling 



286 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

sentiment of his plays, while he seems early to 
have understood the world, he seems also to have 
long retained the hope and trustfulness of youth. 
When we consider that The Merry Wives of Wind- 
sor. King Henry the Fifth, and Hamlet were writ- 
ten within two years, we shall see that it is diffi- 
cult, if not impossible, to mark his periods by sen- 
timent, choice of subject, or manner of treatment. 
It is only by his literary or external style that we 
trace his passage from youth to maturity. Other- 
wise Shakespeare seems to have had moods, not 
periods. Age, too, although it brings more ac- 
quaintance with mankind, does not necessarily 
bring better knowledge of human nature. That 
knowledge is not an aggregation, but a growth ; its 
germ is born with him who has it, and it spreads 
from within. Individuals are mere opportunities 
for its development, occasions for its manifesta- 
tion. That Shakespeare availed himself of all 
such opportunities and occasions, that he tested 
his judgments by experiment and his concep- 
tions by comparison, that he watched in the men 
and women around him the operation of those 
laws to which his creations must conform, cannot 
reasonably be doubted. It is probable, too, that 
he found here and there a trait, or even a charac- 
ter, which, though not a model, was a suggestion. 
His women especially show the fruit of this kind 
of study. A painter of mere talent, but of fine 
taste and dexterous hand, may elaborate a perfect 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



287 



figure from models none of which are perfect ; but 
a painter of great genius, constantly studying and 
observing, makes his knowledge a part of himself, 
and produces many figures, not by various combi- 
nations of remembered forms, but by independent 
creations instinct with the knowledge which he 
has assimilated and the laws which he has mas- 
tered. Of the latter kind was Shakespeare's 
study and Shakespeare's knowledge. That he did 
not draw his personages from life is manifest from 
the facts that all the principal of them, those the 
creation of which made his fame what it is, are 
such as he could not possibly have seen, except in 
mental vision, and that the experiences through 
which they pass, and by which their living proto- 
types most have manifested their intellectual and 
moral traits to him, are such as he could not have 
had the opportunity of observing. Did Shake- 
speare ever meet a mad king, a king whose con- 
scious kingliness is supreme even in his madness, 
but whose dawning madness tinges the first man- 
ifestations of his kingly power ? As well suppose 
that he had met a Caliban. Shakespeare's mind 
contained, but it had not received, his characters. 
In that play so marvellously full of thought, 7;i£?/- 
lus and Cressida, perhaps the most thoughtful of 
his works, Ulysses rises to the full height of our 
idea of the wandering Ithacan. Whence came 
this Ulysses t Not from Homer's brain ; for al- 
though Homer tells us that the king of Ithaca 



288 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

was "divine" and "spear-renowned," and "well 
skilled in various enterprise and counsel," the 
deeds and words of the hero as represented by 
the great poet hardly justify these epithets. Here 
we see that Shakespeare was even wiser than the 
Homeric ideal of human wisdom. For Shake- 
speare made our Ulysses. It was but his name 
and his reputation that had come down from an- 
tiquity. It was the character that corresponded 
to and justified these that Shakespeare supplied, 
in this instance as in many others. He did not 
restore a limb, or even supply a head ; but, as if 
catching and filling the outline of a shadow van- 
ished for centuries, he surmounted with the speak- 
ing substance of that shadow an inscribed and 
empty pedestal. 

Shakespeare thus used the skeletons of former 
life that had drifted down to him upon the stream 
of time and were cast at his feet, a heap of mere 
dead matter. But he clothed them with flesh and 
blood, and breathed life into their nostrils ; and 
they lived and moved with a life that was individ- 
ual and self-existent after he had once thrown it 
off from his own exuberant intellectual vitality. 
He made his plays no galleries of portraits of his 
contemporaries, carefully seeking models through 
the social scale, from king to beggar. His teeming 
brain bred lowlier beggars and kinglier kings than 
all Europe could have furnished as subjects for his 
portraiture. He found in his own consciousness 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



289 



ideals, the like of which for beauty or deformity 
neither he nor any other man had ever looked 
upon. In his heart were the motives, the pas- 
sions, of all humanity ; in his mind, the capability, 
if not the actuality, of all human thought. Na- 
ture, in forming him alone of all the poets, had 
laid that touch upon his soul which made it akin 
with the whole world, and which enabled him to 
live at will throughout all time, among all peo- 
ples. Capable thus, in his complete and sym- 
metrical nature, of feeling with and thinking for 
all mankind, he found in an isolated and momen- 
tary phase of his own existence the law which 
governed the life of those to whom that single 
phase was their whole sphere. From the germ 
within himself he produced the perfected individ- 
ual, as it had been or might have been developed. 
The eternal laws of human life were his servants 
by his heaven-bestowed prerogative, and he was 
yet their instrument. Conformed to them because 
instinct with them, obedient to, yet swaying them, 
he used their subtle and unerring powers to work 
out from seemingly trivial and independent truths 
the vast problems of humanity ; and standing ever 
within the limits of his own experience, he read 
and reproduced the inner life of those on the lof- 
tiest heights or in the lowest depths of being, with 
the certainty of the physiologist who from the 
study of his own organization recreates the mon- 
sters of the ante-human world, or of the astrono- 
13 s 



2Q0 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

mer who, not moving from his narrow study, an- 
nounced the place, form, movement, and condition 
of a planet then hid from earthly eyes in the abyss 
of space. 

Shakespeare thus suffered not even a temporary 
absorption in his personages ; he lost not the least 
consciousness of sellhood, or the creator's power 
over the clay that he was moulding. He was 
at no time a murderer at heart because he drew 
Macbeth, or mad because he made King Lear. 
We see that, although he thinks with the brain 
and feels with the soul of each of his personages 
by turns, he has the power of deliberate intro- 
spection during this strange metempsychosis, and 
of standing outside of his transmuted self, and 
regarding these forms which his mind takes on 
as we do ; in a word, of being at the same time 
actor and spectator. 

This wonderful duality in unity is perhaps most 
striking in Shakespeare's representation of in- 
sanity. It is comparatively easy to understand 
how the normal action of one mind is taken on 
by another ; because sane men think and act 
in accordance with known and unchanging laws. 
The union in the dramatist of a thorough knowl- 
edge of human nature with the dramatic faculty 
insures, therefore, a natural development of char- 
acter in his personages. But in the creation 
of a personage whose faculties are supposed to 
be deranged, and thus absolved from the opera- 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



291 



tion of the laws of our common nature, how is 
the dramatist to keep true to that which itself 
has no keeping ? Attempts to represent insanity 
usually produce only a repulsive extravagance of 
word and action, which neither provokes mirth 
nor excites sympathy. But Shakespeare seems 
not to have found even this limit to his power 
of thinking and feeling with the creatures of his 
imagination. He has portrayed insanity in nearly 
every form in which it is known to the students 
of psychological pathology ; and so true do they 
find him to nature, even in disorganization, their 
analysis only discovering that his intuition has 
been beforehand, that they, like all other ob- 
servers of mankind, from testing him by nature 
have come to studying nature in him. With 
delicate and unerring discrimination he distin- 
guishes between the various kinds of mental 
derangement, and even follows the disorder in 
its advancing stages from the first unsettling of 
the reason until the mind lies wrecked before us, 
— as in Ophelia, a sweet flower crushed and per- 
fumeless, or in Lear, a grand and awful ruin. 

Our inability to follow or to comprehend the 
working of Shakespeare's mind in no way dimin- 
ishes our capacity of apprehending or appreciating 
its creations. Man conceives, or receives, the very 
idea of God, because there is in him some Divine 
capacity ; and his god, that which he worships, 
is ever the measure of his moral and intellectual 



292 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



elevation. This axiom is of general application. 
But most especially in his appreciation of so lofty 
and universal an intelligence as Shakespeare's 
does a man show the elevation or the meanness, 
the richness or the poverty, the purity or the foul- 
ness, of his own soul. It is a vain notion, put forth 
by some who should know better, that much study, 
reflection, and earnest endeavor are required to 
understand Shakespeare rightly. Culture and dis- 
cipline and natural powers of analysis are doubt- 
less demanded for the explanation of motives and 
characteristic traits of Shakespeare's personages, 
and to the unravelling of some of his involved 
passages (which are very few), or following of 
some of his highest flights of fancy. But almost 
all of us must have something of Shakespeare la- 
tent in our souls, voiceless and unexpressed ; else 
we should be incapable of that sympathetic com- 
prehension of his thoughts and his characters, the 
existence of which among ever-increasing mul- 
titudes for many generations is the only possi- 
ble condition of his peculiar and enduring fame. 
Some men, it is true, will never understand him 
in some passages, and some, happily for the world 
very few, will not be able to understand him at all 
by any study or reflection of which they are capa- 
ble. This from no proneness of the poet to par- 
adox, or to eccentric or sentimental views of life, 
or to over-subtlety of thought. For although of all 
poets he is most profoundly psychological, as well 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 293 

as most fanciful and most imaginative, yet with him 
philosophy, fancy, and imagination are penetrated 
with the spirit of that unwritten law of reason 
which we speak of as if it were a faculty, common 
sense. His philosophy is practical, and his prac- 
tical views are fused with philosophy and poetry. 
He is withal the sage and the oracle of this world. 
Subjects which are essentially, and in other hands 
would seem, prosaic and almost sordid, are raised 
by him into the realms of poetry, and yet in lan- 
guage so clearly expressive of their essential char- 
acter as to be adopted as shrewd maxims by the 
worldly wise. 

In this constant presence and rule of reason in 
his most exalted flights, we recognize again a trait 
of the English origin and character of his genius, — 
a trait which is at the foundation of its eminence, 
even in the realm of imagination, but at which 
other people often jeer. Even in our passions we 
will ask, " Why .? " and say, " Because." " Voila;' 
cries the French maid in one of the few passages 
of insight in Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife, — " Voila 
till vrai Anglais ! II est mnoureiix, et cependaiit il 
veut raison7ter" 

Many people have given themselves serious 
concern as to the moral influence of Shakespeare's 
plays ; and critics of great weight, fulfilling their 
function, have gone down far and stayed down 
long in the attempt to fathom the profound moral 



294 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



purpose which they are sure must be hidden in the 
depths of these mighty compositions.* But the 
direct moral influence of Shakespeare is nothing ; 
and we may be sure that he wrote with no moral 
purpose. He sought only to present life ; and 
the world which he shows us, like that in which 
we live, teaches us moral lessons according to our 
will and our capacity. Johnson, meaning censure 
of " his first defect," wrote Shakespeare's highest 
praise in this respect, in saying of him that " he 
carries his persons indifferently through right or 
wrong, and at the close dismisses them without 
further care, and leaves their example to operate 
by chance." That word "indifferently" is Shake- 
speare's eulogy. He gives the means of study, 
and leads insensibly to reflection. Men resent or 
turn away from conviction at the lips of others, 
which they will receive and lay to heart if they 
hear it from the lips of the inward monitor. And 
even children see through and despise the shallow 
device which makes goodness always lead to hap- 
piness, and flout the stories which conduct them 

* The feeling of the latter half of the last century, and of the 
earlier years of the present, upon this subject, is well represented 
by the following passage from the Dramatic Censor's article 
\y^Q)Xv Richard the Third: — 

"Having now given a general delineation of the plot and 
arrangement of the scenes, it becomes necessary to inquire for 
the moral, without which no dramatic piece can have intrinsic 
worth." — Vol. I. p. 9, ed, 1770. 

This notion in a very stupendous form seems to have seized 
hold of the Germans of the last and present generations. 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



295 



through artificial paths to bring them out upon 
a moral. Man, however gifted, can never teach 
more than life and nature ; and among gifted men 
there has been only Shakespeare who could teach 
as much. The moral unity which distinguishes 
his plays is not, as some, especially among the 
Germans, would have it, the result of a moral pur- 
pose deliberately planned and well worked out; 
but of the fact that those dramatic poems were 
the spontaneous manifestation of one great, sym- 
metrical mind, in complete and intimate accord- 
ance with nature. Shakespeare is able to teach as 
much as nature, nay, even more than unmitigat- 
ed nature does, for two reasons. One is, that he 
presents us something which is not nature, but a 
perfect reflex of nature. It is strange, but true as 
strange, that imitation generally interests us more 
than reality. The very reflection of a beautiful 
landscape in a mirror wins our attention more, 
nay, seems more beautiful, than the landscape it- 
self Seen in a Claude glass it becomes a picture, 
a quasi work of art, which we study, over which 
we muse, and to which we again and again recur ; 
while the scene itself, if we see it often, may become 
to us an unnoticed part of our daily life, like the 
rising of the sun, that daily miracle. And so the 
mirror which, following his own maxim, Shake- 
speare holds up to nature, is more studied by us 
than Nature herself, and by means of it nature is 
better understood. The phenomena are brought 



296 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



by him within the range of our mutual vision. 
Reduced in their dimensions, but kept perfect in 
proportion and true in color, they are transferred 
to and fixed upon his pages ; and we can take 
down from our shelves these specimens of thought 
and passion, and muse and ponder over them at 
leisure. This is measurably true of all imagi- 
native writing ; but it is pre-eminently true of 
Shakespeare's. 

But the chief reason of Shakespeare's ability to 
teach us as much as nature is a breadth of moral 
sympathy, a wide intellectual charity, which makes 
him as impartial as nature. His mirror tinges 
the scene which it reflects with no color of its 
own. The life-giving rain of his genius falls 
equally on the just and the unjust ; and as the 
sunshine and the shower develop both tares and 
wheat according to their kind, so he never seeks 
to modify the nature or the seeming of that which 
he quickens into life ; and he is never more im- 
partial than when he is most creative. What viler 
or more loathsome creature than Parolles was ever 
spoken into being ? who is never more disgusting, 
though he may be more irritating or ridiculous, 
than in his interview with Helena on his first ap- 
pearance. Yet in this very dialogue, unquotable 
though it be, what insight, what wisdom, what 
practical sense, are developed through this wretch, 
though we detest the creature as Helena does, 
and as Shakespeare meant we should, for uttering 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



297 



then and there the conclusions of his keen but 
degraded judgment ! Yet we look upon this 
abominable creature with admiration ; nay, he fas- 
cinates us by his exquisite loathsomeness, which 
is as proper to him as crawling to a reptile. As 
Helena herself says in the words which Shake- 
speare furnished her, concentrating in these four 
Hues all that I have just tried to say, and elevat- 
ing it into poetry with that apparently uncon- 
scious exercise of supreme mastery over expres- 
sion which must make every man who holds a 
pen despair, — 

" These fix'd evils sit so fit in him 
That they take place, when virtue's steely bones 
Look bleak in the cold air. Withal full oft we see 
Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly." 

It was this quality of universal sympathy in his 
mental constitution which enabled Shakespeare 
to unite to the knowledge of man and of truth 
that knowledge of men and of things which is 
called knowledge of the world. He seems to 
have had this latter knowledge in as great a de- 
gree as that more abstract knowledge which made 
him a great dramatic and philosophical poet, and 
to have been the most perfect man of the world 
whose name appears upon the roll of literature. 
All that we know of his life shows him in full pos- 
session of this great qualification of the perfect 
social man, so rarely found in poets ; and his 
works are pervaded with its exhibition. Consider 
13* 



298 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



well such characters as Angelo, Parolles, Faulcon- 
bridge, Polonius, Jaques, Falstaff, such gentlemen 
as Bassanio, Mercutio, Prince Henry, Cassio, An- 
tony (in yulius CcEsar), and see what knowledge, 
not only of the human heart, but of society, of 
manners, of actual life, in short, to return to the ac- 
cepted phrase, what knowledge of the world, these 
characters display. It is this knowledge, this tact, 
which enables him to walk so firmly and so deli- 
cately upon the perilous edge of essential decency, 
and not fall into the foul slough below, where the 
elegant dramatists of the last century lie wallow- 
ing. This he does notably, for instance, in Faul- 
conbridge and Falstaff, — Falstaff, a gentleman by 
birth and breeding, but coarse, gross, mean, and 
selfish, a degraded castaway, yet, with consum- 
mate tact and exquisite art never allowed to be 
vulgar or repulsive, and whose matchless humor 
makes his company delightful. 

It has been objected to the assertion of the am- 
plitude of Shakespeare's mind, and to the gener- 
osity of his character, that he always represents 
the laborer and the artisan in a degraded position, 
and often makes his ignorance and his uncouth- 
ness the butt of ridicule. The charge is brought 
by reformers and philanthropists of such narrow 
views that they cannot see that art is not the 
pioneer, but the landscape gardener, of society. 
Shakespeare, although he thought as a philoso- 
pher, wrought as an artist ; and art has to do 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



299 



with the facts of the world before it, ideahzing 
them, but not changing their nature. Three hun- 
dred years ago the husbandman and the mechanic 
were degraded in the world's eyes ; and Shake- 
speare, the healthiness of whose understanding is 
as remarkable as any trait of his genius, knew that 
the world's appreciation is generally right of men 
in mass, and that these hard-handed men had all 
the consideration that was their due, though not 
all the rights or advantages. It is always so. In- 
dividual men may fail to receive a just apprecia- 
tion ; but as surely as water finds its level, classes 
of men always rise to the standing that they 
can maintain. It is because the workingman, 
whether his labor be rude or skilled, has raised 
himself, has in fact become another man, that the 
world now awards him a consideration which he 
did not receive in the days of Queen Elizabeth. 
Shakespeare, although he represented the world 
as he saw it, was no panegyrist of things as they 
were, no mere laudator temporis acti. He was no 
sycophant to power. Whatever might have been 
the faults of others in this regard, (and they seem 
to have been fewer and less in the mother country 
in those days than in the present,) Shakespeare 
did not hesitate to tell kings and nobles all the 
truth, and even to put it into their own mouths. 
In bitterness of soul King Richard II. utters in 
the following passage at once a sarcasm and a 
confession : — 



300 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

" For within the hollow crown, 
That rounds the mortal temples of a king, 
Keeps Death his court : and there the antic sits. 
Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp ; 
Allowing him a breath, a little scene 
To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks ; 
Infusing him with self and vain conceit, 
As if this flesh, which walls about our life. 
Were brass impregnable, and, humor'd thus, 
Comes at the last, and with a little pin 
Bores through his castle wall, and — farewell, king ! 
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood 
With solemn reverence : throw away respect, 
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty. 
For you have but mistook me all this while : 
I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, 
Need friends. Subjected thus. 
How can you say to me, I am a king ? " 

And Shakespeare's favorite among his kings, 
Harry the Fifth, says, when disguised as a com- 
mon soldier, " I think the king is but a man, 
as I am ; the violet smells to him as it doth to 
me; the element shows to him as it doth to 
me ; all his senses have but human conditions ; 
his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he ap- 
pears but a man." One passage of Cymbeline is 
too remarkably in point to be passed by ; for 
although it is addressed by a princess to, as 
she supposes, two mountaineers, it unites an as- 
sertion of the most catholic and radical equality 
with a quiet, cutting satire upon the conventional 
distinctions of rank and privilege. Arviragus 
asks Imogen, " Are we not brothers ? " and the 
princess answers, 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 301 

" So man and man should be ; 
But clay and clay differs in dignity, 
Whose dust is both alike." 

Shakespeare himself, in his personal opinions 
and inclinations, is so little traceable in his works, 
that we can only judge of his feeling toward the 
wretched and oppressed by the intimate sympa- 
thy which he shows with their privations and their 
sufferings, and also their lowly pleasures. Could 
this be better shown than in these lines spoken 
again by King Henry the Fifth ? 

" Not all these, laid in bed majestical, 
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave ; 
Who, with a body fill'd, and vacant mind, 
Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread. 
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell, 
But like a lackey, from the rise to set, 
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night 
Sleeps in Elysium ; next day, after dawn, 
Doth rise, and help Hyperion to his horse. 
And follow so the ever-running year, 
With profitable labor, to his grave : 
And but for ceremony, such a wretch. 
Winding up days with toil, and nights with sleep, 
Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king." 

Again, in Kmo- Lear, Edgar's disguising himself 
as an Abraham man gave Shakespeare an oppor- 
tunity, which so thrifty a householder as he was 
might well have seized, to hold up those tramping 
pests of our forefathers to condemnation, or at 
least to ridicule. But his picture presents the suf- 
ferer's side of the case, and tells us how he " eats 



302 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall- 
newt and the water, swallows the old rat and the 
ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing 
pool, and is whipped from tything to tything, and 
stocked, punished, and imprisoned." Shakespeare 
must have well known the ways of the begging 
impostor ; but he chose to show us in this most 
touching manner the dreadful extremities and suf- 
ferings of the vagrant pauper. 

The little that remains to be said is of a general 
nature. 

Shakespeare's art was not simple, its manifesta- 
tion was not serene. Simplicity and serenity are 
the highest ideal in the arts of design. The Greeks 
attained it in their sculpture and their temples ; 
Raphael, in his Madonnas ; and even in landscape 
art, the highest style is that which, rising above 
the representation of phenomenal effects, presents 
the ideal of Nature in her wonted phases. But 
this limitation does not hold in literature ; and 
especially in dramatic literature, in which action, 
complication, intensity, and variety approaching 
incongruity, are compatible with, if not essential 
to, the attainment of the highest excellence. Gre- 
cian architecture is simple and severe, but not 
therefore the highest type of architecture. And 
Shakespeare's genius may be well compared (and 
possibly the comparison is not new) to a Gothic 
cathedral, vast, grand, and solemn in its general 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



303 



aspect, and single in its total impression, yet on 
closer view seen to bear the stamp of various pe- 
riods, and to be filled with airy, light, upspringing 
columns, and minutely decorated with delicate tra- 
cery, and grotesque, humorous, and even indeco- 
rous details, correspondent to each other, yet all 
unlike though seeming like, and, to an eye capable 
of the great whole, blending into rich harmony. 

There are these three, — Homer, Dante, and 
Shakespeare. And these three have pre-eminence 
in right of their imaginations. Homer saw with 
placid mental eye the people and the deeds that 
he describes, as clearly as if they had passed be- 
fore him in the flesh; Astyanax shrinking from 
his father's flashing helm and threatening crest ; 
Hector striding across the battle-field, his huge 
shield rattling, as he walked, against his neck and 
ankles ; the opposing hosts, assembled upon the 
plain, whose swaying spears and waving plumes, 
seen from afar, showed dark broad ripples, like 
cat's-paws on the water. Dante, with more inci- 
sive word-touch, if not more penetrating vision, 
puts before us Ugolino and his boys dying one 
by one of hunger; the Centaur with an arrow 
parting his beard upon his jaws before he speaks ; 
or those two tormented alchemists who leaned 
against each other like pans set up to dry, and 
scraped the scales from their leprous bodies in 
prurient agony. But Shakespeare's imagination 
was more than this. Homer and Dante saw : 



204 SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 

he not only saw, but was. His art is more than 
imagination, more than fancy, more than philos- 
ophy, more than their aggregation. It is their 
union in one nameless faculty. Indeed, it is 
only after recurring to Homer and Dante, and to 
Milton, Virgil, and Horace, that we know how 
far, how immeasurably far, is the step from the 
lofty cumulation of all their qualities to Shake- 
speare's quality. It is almost like that from the 
finite to the infinite. As we add number to num- 
ber, until numbers cease to have significance, and 
then at last spring to the idea of infinite, to which 
we cannot otherwise approach, so we put together 
all the qualities of all other poets, and then, see- 
ing our failure to reach the Parnassian summit 
by heaping Pelions upon Ossas, we break ofi" and 
leap to Shakespeare. 

Shakespeare worked all his wonders with the 
lordliness of a supreme master ; yet, we may be 
sure, not without labor. Certain men have higher 
tasks, and for them higher faculties, than others : 
he, highest. But nothing is attained by human 
powers, however transcendent, without paying for 
it man's price, — toil. There is no such thing as 
real impromptu. There is only the ready use on 
present occasion of the fruits of past exertion ; — 

" Che, seggendo in piuma, 
In fama non si vien, ne sotto coltre." * 

But may not the time arrive when the world 

* Inferno, Canto XXIV. 1. 47. 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



305 



will say, We have had enough of Shakespeare ? 
May not men become pardonably weary of hear- 
ing of this one matchless man, and so ostracize 
him for his very excellence ? It might possibly 
be so, if men lived forever ; but generation suc- 
ceeds to generation, and to each one he is new, 
and so will be new as long as the tongue in which 
he wrote is spoken. To each fresh reader Shake- 
speare brings more than one life can exhaust, and 
those who have studied him longest are they who 
are best assured that no man ever laid his head 
so close upon the great heart of Nature, and 
heard so clearly the throb of her deep pulses. 
For this reason the man who studies Shakespeare 
and attempts the unfolding of his characters is 
not engaged in mere literary criticism, is not a 
literary parasite ; he is dealing with the most hid- 
den and elemental truths of man's knowledge of 
mankind ; and for this reason, too, it is, that he 
who has really any thoughts of his own upon 
Shakespeare to give to the world is sure of a 
kindly disposed audience. For very few, even of 
the most sensitive souls and penetrating intellects, 
have felt for themselves and perceived for them- 
selves all the beauty and the strength and the 
wisdom of those marvellous works that were writ- 
ten with the immediate purpose only of drawing 
full houses to the Black-friars Theatre in London 
in the days of Good Queen Bess. 



3o6 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



All that I have inadequately said is true, and 
yet it is no less true that Shakespeare revealed to 
the world no new truth in ethics, in politics, or in 
philosophy. He was not an intellectual discov- 
erer. If the plague had not spared him in his 
cradle, the great movements of the world would 
have been deprived of no direct impulse coming 
from his mind. They would have gone on with- 
out him, much as they have gone on under the 
influence of his writings. No social or political 
development of his race or of mankind would 
have been checked, except in so far as a diffusion 
of intellectual and moral culture and refinement 
might have been retarded. For man's knowledge 
of himself would have been very much more lim- 
ited, because of the lack of those works which af- 
ford at once the most alluring temptations to the 
study of human nature and the best field and 
school for its pursuit. The English, or, if we 
choose to call it so, the Anglo-Saxon race, both 
in Europe and in America, would have lacked a 
certain degree of that general elevation of mental 
and moral tone, and that practical wisdom, which 
distinguish it among the peoples. A source of 
pleasure more exquisite and more refining than is 
elsewhere to be found, of instruction more nearly 
priceless than any except that which fell from the 
lips of Jesus of Nazareth, would not have been 
opened. Thus, though Shakespeare exercised no 
direct influence upon the world's progress, that 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



307 



which he has exercised indirectly is large and is 
constantly increasing, and it will increase with the 
diffusion of our race, and an acquaintance with its 
literature. 

It has been before remarked, that the drama- 
tists of Shakespeare's time, writing' only to please 
the people, had only to consult the general taste, 
and were free from any restraint except that im- 
posed by their own judgment. Some of them did 
attempt to work, measurably at least, according 
to classical formulas, and these failed entirely to 
attain the ends which they had in view, — popu- 
larity and profit. Of the rest, all, with one or 
two exceptions, being without a trusty monitor, 
external or internal, fell into monstrous extrava- 
gance, coarseness, conceit, and triviality. But 
Shakespeare, save for his conformity to mere out- 
side fashion, was entirely unlike his contempo- 
raries. He is among them, but not of them. 
Their minds run in the same channel, but do not 
mingle. The powerful and pellucid current of his 
thought flows swiftly and clearly side by side with 
their sluggish and turbid outpourings, leaving 
them behind, and taking no tint or taint from its 
surroundings. To him there was gain instead 
of loss in the disregard of formulas. Creative 
genius is mostly great, not by means of for- 
mulas, but in their despite. Almost inevitably 
it provokes censure by breaking through estab- 
lished rules ; a truth which has at last obtained 



3o8 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



such recognition that defiance of rule is some- 
times ignorantly set up as evidence of genius, — 
of which only individuality and inherent vitality 
and strength are witnesses. The so-called extrav- 
agances of genius establish its claims by them- 
selves becoming formulas for minds of lower 
rank ; and thus schools are formed, of which no 
one is really great except the founder. Yet the 
highest order of poets, the seraphs of the art, do 
not have followers, because they soar too high 
in the empyrean for the manner of their flight 
to be observed and imitated. It is the second- 
rate men, great yet second, who form schools. 
For their way of working is discernible, compre- 
hensible, imitable. But the supremely divine is 
ever a mystery. This is especially true of Shake- 
speare. As he worked in the manner of no 
school, so he founded none. He adopted the old 
forms indeed, and he labored with the same ar- 
tistic motive, as well as the same material objects, 
as his contemporaries and immediate predecessors 
and successors. But this produced no living like- 
ness between their offspring. His plays and those 
of Marlowe, Jonson, Massinger, Marston, Middle- 
ton, Ford, and Field have neither in their dra- 
matic nor their poetical traits the least family like- 
ness ; none, in fact, except a certain affluence and 
strength of diction, and certain colloquial tricks 
of expression, characteristic of the period. The 
mistakes which have been made upon this subject 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



309 



by writers of mark are so great as to cast a doubt 
upon the soundness of all critical judgment. Al- 
though Shakespeare worked not only among a 
throng of dramatists and poets, but even occasion- 
ally with some of them, there is in truth no more 
striking fact in the history of literature than the 
solitary position and peculiar character of his ge- 
nius. Beaumont and Fletcher, and all that crew, 
who came after him, although more brilliant than 
Peele and Marlowe, and all that crew, that went 
before him, caught no fire from his soul, no light 
from his intellect. He rose upon the world eclips- 
ing a few twinkling stars and one fitful meteor ; 
and after his grand career he sank like a midsum- 
mer sun, in full splendor, leaving no moon behind 
him to prolong his reign by shining with his re- 
flected glory.* 

May the world expect another Shakespeare } 
Not unless circumstances corresponding to those 
which produced this Shakespeare should occur 
again. Shakespeare marked a stage in the world's 
progress, or at least in the history of a race which 
since his time has more than any other influenced 
that progress. He appeared at the period when 
the English character, slowly forming through 
centuries, had attained its typical development ; 
when the English language had assumed a form 

* Yet I remember seeing in a bookseller's catalogue, at the 
end of a book published at the beginning of the last century, the 
announcement of a tragedy, yane Shore I believe, " in Shake- 
speare's style, by N. Rowe." 



310 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



from which it has not varied sensibly for three 
centuries, and when our race, having freed itself 
from the restraints of feudalism, had attained the 
most symmetrical and harmonious social develop- 
ment possible to it under an established gradation 
of classes. The English nobleman three centuries 
ago, whether called by herald lord or gentleman, 
was a spontaneous product of a healthy soil, a 
goodly tree nourished by fibres that pierced the 
mould of centuries. But he had flourished his 
appointed time ; and before the prerogative of 
the Tudor his root began to perish, and under 
the sun of the Reformation his branches to with- 
er ; and since then aristocracy in England has 
been living, year after year, a fictitious life, and 
year after year has needed more props to keep 
its sapless form above the ground, which its de- 
cay and fall will enrich for another spontaneous 
outgrowth. It was to express the spirit and give 
form to the ideas of such a completed period in 
the history of the English people, as well as to 
utter the eternal truths, or rather it was to speak 
those truths with the voice of that period, that he 
who was " of an age " as well as " for all time " 
appeared. A new Shakespeare may be born to 
us ; but only as the fruit of new conditions. He 
can only appear when essential civilization, not 
mere outward refinement, has advanced so far as 
to have established radically new relations among 
men, and when our language has so far changed 



SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. 



311 



as to be the fitting vehicle for the expression of a 
new philosophy, a new worldly wisdom, a new 
range of sympathy, new sentiment, both high and 
homely, and a new cast of thought. For in him 
of whom we speak the old has had its full expres- 
sion. It may be doubted whether these conditions 
will, even in the new England, ever be fulfilled. 
But should they be, then Nature, at once chary 
and inexhaustible, never working in vain, but ever 
prompt and able to supply the needs which she 
creates, will produce another Shakespeare, because 
then, and not till then, another will be required. 



AN ACCOUNT 
OF THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF 

THE ENGLISH DRAMA 

TO THE TIME OF SHAKESPEARE. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



THE remains of our early drama may be re- 
garded from two principal points : one, that 
of the lover of what is old for the mere sake of its 
antiquity ; the other, that of the critical student of 
this department of English literature. The labor, 
or the pastime, of the former investigator may be 
protracted almost at his pleasure ; for the mate- 
rial is ample, although it is probable that not one 
in ten of the English plays written before the 
time of Shakespeare have escaped destruction. 
But the task of the latter, weary and endless al- 
though it seems at first, soon shortens by its very 
lack of interest. For it does not take long to dis- 
cover that, with two or three exceptions, the ex- 
isting English plays written before the year 1580 
offer to the modern reader only an unvarying suc- 
cession of platitude, triviality, coarseness, and bom- 
bast, rarely relieved even by traits which indicate 
the manners and the customs of the people to 
please whom they were produced. The practised 
student soon learns to take in the qualities of one 
of these performances at a rapid glance. The 



3i6 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



dreariness of a desert, seen at first sight, is not 
known the more surely by an examination of the 
grains of sand which form its dry, interminable 
waste ; nor is it necessary to a knowledge of the 
English drama before the time of Shakespeare 
sufficient to the appreciation of the state in which 
he found it, that the reader should be dragged 
step by step over the ground which his guide has 
previously explored. Therefore, as this historical 
sketch regards the literary rather than the anti- 
quarian aspect of that drama, it may well be brief, 
even while it seeks to present all that, either by 
intrinsic or relative interest, can illustrate its 
theme. 

The English drama, like the Greek, has a pure- 
ly religious origin. The same is true of the dra- 
ma of every civilized people of modern times. It 
is worthy of particular remark, that the theatre, 
denounced by churchmen and by laymen of emi- 
nently evangelical profession as base, corrupting, 
and sinful, not in its abuse and its degradation, but 
in its very essence, should have been planted and 
nourished by churchmen, having priests for its first 
authors and actors, and having been for centuries 
the chief school of religion and of morals to an 
unlettered people. The taste for dramatic repre- 
sentation seems to be innate in man. He loves 
to simulate and to see others simulate character, 
and seem, without deceit, other than they are. He 
finds pleasure in the consciousness that the per- 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



317 



sonage before him, still more that he himself, is 
both John Smith and Julius Caesar. No people, 
however rude and savage, except some of the more 
degraded tribes of Africa, have been yet discov- 
ered with whom dramatic performance of some 
kind, although coarse and rudimentary, was not 
a customary amusement. And when the great 
showman of the day exhibits a dwarf, he shrewdly 
takes advantage of this craving, and, not trusting 
to the mere monstrosity of his little monster, he 
sends him before the people in the character of 
Achilles or Napoleon ; nay, even ventures thus to 
show the Iron Duke himself his own picture in 
little. Theatrical representations have probably 
continued without interruption from the time of 
^schylus. Even in the dark ages, which we look 
back upon too exclusively as a period of gloom, 
tumult, and blood-shedding, people bought and 
sold, and were married and given in marriage, 
and feasted and amused themselves as we do now ; 
and we may be sure that among their amusements 
dramatic representations of some sort were not 
lacking. 

The earliest dramatic performances in the mod- 
ern languages of Europe, of which we have any 
record or tradition, were representations of the 
most striking events recorded in the Hebrew 
Scriptures and in the Christian Gospels, of some 
of the stories told in the Pseudo Evangelium or 
spurious Gospel, and of legends of the saints. 



3i8 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



On the Continent these were called Mysteries ; in 
England, both Mysteries and Miracle-Plays. When 
miracle-plays were first performed, it seems quite 
impossible to determine ; and indeed, from the 
universality of the taste for dramatic representa- 
tions, there can hardly be a more perplexing or 
fruitless task than the attempt to discover the 
time and place of their origin. The ancient He- 
brews had at least one miracle-play. It was found- 
ed upon the exodus of their people from Egypt. 
Fragments of this play, in Greek iambics, have 
been preserved to modern times in the works of 
various authors. The principal characters are 
Moses, Zipporah, and God in the Bush. The au- 
thor, one Ezekiel, is called by Scaliger the tragic 
poet of the Jews. His work is referred by one 
critic to a date before the Christian era ; others 
suppose that he was one of the Seventy Transla- 
tors ; but Warton, my authority in this instance, 
supposes that he wrote his play after the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem, hoping by its means to warm 
the patriotism and revive the hopes of his deject- 
ed countrymen. 

The Eastern Empire long clung to all the glo- 
ries to which its name, its language, and its posi- 
tion gave it a presumptive title ; and the tragedies 
of Sophocles and Euripides were performed after 
some fashion at Constantinople until the fourth 
century. At this period, Gregory Nazianzen, arch- 
bishop, patriarch, and one of the fathers of the 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. ^ig 

Church, banished the pagan drama from the Greek 
stage, and substituted plays founded on subjects 
taken from the Hebrew or the Christian Scriptures. 
St. Gregory wrote many plays of this kind him- 
self; and Warton says that one of them, called 
Xpto-To? iraa'^wv, or Christ's Passion, is still ex- 
tant.* In this play, which, according to the Pro- 
logue, was written in imitation of Euripides, the 
Virgin Mary was introduced upon the stage, mak- 
ing then, as far as we know, her first appearance. 
St. Gregory died about A. D. 390. Gregory's re- 
ligious plays more than rivalled his other theo- 
logical writings in the favor of the people ; for, as 
Warton also mentions, St. Chrysostom, who soon 
succeeded Gregory in the see of Constantinople, 
complained that in his day people heard a come- 
dian with much more pleasure than a minister of 
the Gospel. St. Chrysostom held the see of Con- 
stantinople from A. D. 398 to A. D. 404. In this 
quarter, also, another kind of dramatic represen- 
tation, that of mummery or masking, developed 
itself in a Christian or modern form. It is known 
that many of the Christian festivals which have 
come down to us from the dark ages were the 
fruits of a grafting of Christian legends upon 
pagan ceremonies ; a contrivance by which the 
priests supposed that they had circumvented the 
heathen, who would more easily give up their re- 

* History of English Poetry, Sec. XXXIV., Vol. II. p. 517, ed. 
1840. 



320 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

ligion than their feasts and their hoUdays. And 
the introduction of reUgious mumming and mask- 
ing by Theophylact, Patriarch of Constantinople, 
about the year 990, has been reasonably attributed 
to a design of giving the people a Christian per- 
formance which they could and would substitute 
in place of the bacchanalian revels. He is said by 
an historian of the succeeding generation to have 
" introduced the practice which prevails even at 
this day, of scandalizing God and the memory of 
his saints on the most splendid and popular festi- 
vals, by indecent and ridiculous songs and enor- 
mous shoutings, .... diabolical dances, exclama- 
tions of ribaldry, and ballads borrowed from the 
streets and brothels." The Feast of Fools and the 
Feast of Asses, the latter of which was instituted 
in honor of Balaam's beast, had this origin. Such 
mingling of revelry and religion as these feasts, 
and of amusement and instruction in the faith as 
the mysteries, suited both the priestly and the 
popular need of the time ; and they soon found 
their way westward, and particularly into France. 
Here, not long after, the Feast of Asses was per- 
formed, and in this manner. The clergy walked on 
Christmas-day in procession, habited to represent 
Moses, David, the prophets, other Hebrews and 
Assyrians. Balaam, with an immense pair of 
spurs, rode on a wooden ass, which enclosed a 
speaker. Virgil was one of the procession, which 
moved on, chanting versicles and dialoguing in 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 32 1 

character on the birth of Christ, through the body 
of the church, until it reached the choir * The 
fairs of those days, which were the great occasions 
of profit and amusement, offered opportunities for 
the performance of these " holy farces," or of the 
soberer mysteries of miracle-plays, of which the 
priests did not fail to avail themselves ; and thus 
this rude form of religious drama spread grad- 
ually, but not slowly, throughout Europe. 

With regard to one country alone, Italy, is 
there question as to the early prevalence of the 
miracle-play. In all departments of art and lit- 
erature the Italians imitated the Greeks. Vol- 
taire supposed that they soon adopted the relig- 
ious drama from Constantinople ; but Riccoboni, 
who is the chief authority upon this subject, held 
the contrary. We have seen that Gregory in- 
troduced the performance of Christian plays at 
Constantinople in the latter part of the fourth 
century. But in Italy the pagan, or Latin, thea- 
tre held its own, or what we must call its own, 
for centuries afterward, even by the side of the 
Christian drama. Riccoboni indeed seems to 
have thought that only the pagan drama, in a 
gradually degenerating form, was known in Italy 
for seven or eight hundred years later ; and he 
will have it that the very pied and patched dress 
of the modern Harlequin is a remnant of the cos- 

* Warton's History of English Poetry, Sec. VI., Vol. II. p. 29, 

ed 1840. 

14* U 



^22 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

tume of the mimes of the Latin stage. It would 
seem rather a perpetuation of the party-colored 
dress of the Fools of the chivalric period. But be 
this as it may, Warton and his editor Price found 
that religious plays were performed in Italy at a 
period very much earlier than either Riccoboni or 
Crescembini supposed ; in fact, that they were 
common as early as 1250. And it is, in my judg- 
ment, improbable to the verge of impossibihty 
that this form of the drama, (in the creation of 
which priests were the chief agents,) should not 
have been known in Italy before it came into 
vogue in countries farther west, and more remote 
from the spring, at that time, of all religious and 
intellectual movement. Indeed, it is to the free- 
masonry of the priesthood, and to the fact that the 
priests travelled much from country to country, 
and communicated freely with each other, and es- 
pecially upon religious and public matters, that 
we may attribute the universal prevalence of the 
religious drama in all Christian countries through- 
out the later feudal ages. In the natural order 
of things this species of performance would pass 
from Italy to France, and from France to Eng- 
land ; and the supposition that it was brought 
into the latter country across the Channel is sup- 
ported by the fact, that there is evidence that the 
first religious plays performed in England were 
translations from the French. Some yet extant 
have passages in that language scattered through 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



323 



them ; a fact which can be most reasonably ac- 
counted for by the supposition that these iso- 
lated passages are parts of the original, left un- 
translated in the manuscripts which have come 
down to us. It has even been supposed that the 
first miracle-plays produced in England were per- 
formed in French. Possibly this supposition is 
well founded ; but we may be sure that these 
plays soon received an English dress. For the 
miracle-plays were used by the priesthood for the 
religious instruction, not only of those who could 
not read, among whom were the Norman nobles 
who could understand French, but also, and chief- 
ly, of the middle and lower classes, to whom 
French was almost as incomprehensible as the 
Latin in which their prayers were vicariously 
mumbled. Miracle-plays seem to have been, in 
some measure at least, the fruit of the same lau- 
dable desire on the part of the Roman Catholic 
priesthood for the instruction of their people in 
religious truth, to which we owe the rhymed 
homilies or Gospel paraphrases of the thirteenth 
century, in which the lesson of the day, read of 
course in Latin, was translated, amplified, and il- 
lustrated in octosyllabic rhymes, which were read 
to the people by the priest. Six ancient manu- 
script collections of these homilies are known to 
exist ; and in the prologue to the oldest one of 
them, which is of the fourteenth century, and 
which has recently been printed, the writer ex- 



324 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

pressly says that he has undertaken his task of 
thus preaching in English that all may under- 
stand what he says ; because both clerks and ig- 
norant men can understand English, but all men 
cannot understand Latin and French.* 

* Here follows the passage above cited : — 

" Forth! suld ilke precheour schau, 
The god that Godd hauls gert him knau, 
For qua sa hides Godes gift, 
God may chalange him of thift. 
In al thing es he nouht lele, 
That Godes gift fra man wil sele, 
Forthi the litel that I kanne, 
Wil I schau til ilke manne, 
Yf I kan mar god than he, 
For than lif Ic in charite. 
For Godes wisdom that es kid, 
And na thing worthe quen it is hid, 
Forthi wil I of my pouert, 
Schau sum thing that Ik haf in hert, 
On Ingelis tong that alle may 
Understand quat I wil say, 
For laued men hauls mar mister, 
Godes word for to her. 
Than klerkes that thair mirour lokes, 
And sees hou thai sal lif on bokes, 
And bathe klerk and laued man, 
Englis understand kan, 
That was born in Ingeland, 
And lang haues ben thar in wonand, 
Bot al men can noht, I wis, 
Understand Latin and Frankis, 
Forthi me think almous it isse, 
To werke sum god thing on Inglisse, 
That mai ken lered and laued bathe, 
Hou thai mai yem them fra schathe. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



325 



The earliest performance of a miracle-play in 
England of which any record has been discovered 
took place within about ten years previous to 1 1 19. 
The play, founded upon the legend of St. Catha- 
rine, was written by Geoffrey, afterward Abbot 
of St. Alban's, before he became abbot, and was 
performed in Dunstaple. So says Matthew Paris 
in his Lives of the Abbots, which was written be- 
fore 1240. Geoffry, a Norman monk and a mem- 
ber of the University of Paris, became Abbot of 
St. Alban's in 11 19. But his miracle-play was no 
novelty ; for Bulaeus, the historian of the Univer- 
sity of Paris,* tells us that it was at that time 

And stithe stand igain the fend, 
And til the blis of heuen wend." 

English Metrical Homilies^ fro7n MSS. of the Four- 
teenth Century. 4to. Edinburgh, 1862. 

The particular manuscript collection from which this passage 
is taken has special philological interest, as its editor, Mr. John 
Small, remarks, because, as indeed the passage above shows, the 
homilies which it has preserved were composed in the North of 
England at a very early period, when the Anglo-Saxon was pass- 
ing into English, and when the Anglo-Norman French was yet 
in use among the higher classes. Its special interest is enhanced 
also by the fact that it shows that the same broad dialect of Eng- 
lish was common at that period to Scotland south of the Gram- 
pians and to the North of England. The manuscript contains 
internal evidence that the homilies were read by the priests to 
the people ; for in the midst of the second homily are some 
Latin hexameters with this rubric : " Isti versus omittantur a lec- 
tore quando legit Anglicum coram laycis^ 

* I have seen neither Mathew Paris's Historia Major, &c., nor 
Bulasus's Historia Universitatis Parisiensis. Both are cited by 
Markland and Warton, who are here my authorities. 



326 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



common for teachers and scholars to get up these 
performances. Fitz-Stephen, Thomas a Becket's 
contemporary and biographer, also records that 
in London, during or soon after the life of that 
stiff-necked priest, who was put to death in 1 1 70, 
there were performed in London religious plays 
representing the miracles wrought by saints or 
the sufferings and constancy of martyrs.* These 
miracle-plays, or mysteries, derived their name 
from the fact that, whether founded upon the Old 
or the New Testament, the spurious gospel attrib- 
uted to Nicodemus, or church tradition, they al- 
most without exception represented a display of 
supernatural power. Made the means of teach- 
ing not only religious history but religious dog- 
mas, these miracle-plays often represented a dis- 
play of supernatural power in the support of 
those dogmas ; and naturally that one most in 
need of such extra -rational aid, transubstantia- 
tion, received the most of this bolstering. One 
of the oldest manuscript miracle-plays extant, the 
manuscript being, in the judgment of experts, as 
old as 1460-70, is upon this subject. It is called 
The Play of the Blessed Sacrament, and drama- 
tizes a miracle said to have been worked in the 
forest of Aragon in the year 1461 ; but doubtless 

* " Londonia pro spectaculis theatralibus, pro ludis scenicis, 
ludos habet sanctiores, representationes miraculorum, quae sanc- 
ti confessores operati sunt, seu representationes passionum quibus 
claruit constantia martyrum." — Fitz-Stephen's Description of 
London, ed. Pegge, 1773, p. 73. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



327 



the tradition is older. Among the characters are 
Christ, five Jews, a bishop, a curate, a Christian 
merchant, a physician, and his man. The mer- 
chant, whose name is Aristorius, in the crude style 
of these plays thus describes himself : 

" Ffor off all Aragon I am most myghty of sylver and of gold, 
Ffor and yt wer a countre to by now wold I nat wond. 

Syr Arystory ys my name ; 
A merchante myghty of a royall araye ; 

Fful wyde in this worlde spryngyth my fame, 
Fere kend and knowen the sothe for to saye." 

The last line of this extract is noteworthy as in- 
dicative of the existence, even in remote times, of 
the merchant's pride in his mercantile honor, in 
having his word as good as his bond, however 
questionable may be the character, in other re- 
spects, of some of his transactions, as in the case 
of this Aristorius. The principal Jew, whose 
name is Jonathas, induces Aristorius to steal the 
Host and sell it to him for one hundred pounds. 
Then Jonathas and his Hebrew companions take 
it to his house for experimental purposes. They 
stab it ; it bleeds. They are about to plunge it 
into a caldron of boiUng oil ; but Jonathas goes 
mad with the Host in his hand. He still keeping 
his hold, the rest nail the wafer to a post, and at- 
tempt to drag him away. They accomplish their 
purpose with the loss of his hand, which comes 
off and clings to the wafer. The physician is sent 
for, and his man entering first makes sport by a 



328 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



burlesque laudation of his master, who is not 
forthcoming, and as to whom he makes the follow- 
ing proclamation : — 

" Yff ther be eyther man or woman 
That sawe master Brundyche of Braban, 
Or owyht of hym tel can, 

Shall wele be quit hys mede. 
He hath a cut berd and a flatte noose, 
A therde bare gowne and a rent hoose, 
He spekyth never good matere nor purpoose, 

To the pyllere ye hym lede." 

The physician arrives and offers his services ; but 
both master and man are driven out as meddling 
quacks. Jonathas's hand with the Host in it is 
then thrown into the caldron, which immediate- 
ly boils up with blood. The Jews then heat an 
oven red-hot, and cast in the wafer. The oven 
bleeds at the chinks and bursts asunder, and the 
figure of Jesus issues from it, before which the 
Jews prostrate themselves and become Christians 
on the spot. The bishop then forms a religious 
procession, enters the Jew's house, and addresses 
the figure, which changes to bread again. Aris- 
torius confesses his crime, and is ordered, by way 
of penance, to give up buying and selling. The 
bishop then "improves the occasion" offered by 
this comic-pantomime-like performance, and closes 
the play by a rhymed homily upon the doctrines 
of the Trinity and Transubstantiation. Certain 
peculiarities of language indicate that the author 
was a North of England man ; and there are 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 329 

traces in the composition of the old Anglo-Saxon 
alliterative verse. There is more art in the con- 
struction of this play, rude as it is, than in any 
other of the early English plays of its kind. 

There were neither theatres nor professional 
actors in England, indeed in Europe, at the period 
when miracle-plays first came in vogue. The 
first performers in these plays were clergymen ; 
the first stages or scaffolds on which they were 
presented were set up in churches. Evidence that 
this was the case has been discovered in such pro- 
fusion, that it is needless to specify it more partic- 
ularly in this place, than to remark that councils 
and prelates finally found it necessary to forbid 
such performances either in churches or by the 
clergy. But it is worthy of remark, that evidence 
of the ecclesiastical character of the first actors 
of our drama is preserved in dramatic literature 
to this day in the Latin words of direction, Exit 
and Exeimt. The stage directions in the miracle- 
plays (like the direction to the priest as to read- 
ing the metrical homily quoted on page 324) were 
partly, and at first it would seem entirely, in Lat- 
in, which it is needless to say no layman, and not 
all clergymen, could then understand. Even in 
Shakespeare's day Latin held its own in the head- 
ings of the acts and scenes, — Actus PrimuSy 
Scceiia Seamda, and so forth. After the exclusion 
of the clergy from the religious stage, lay broth- 
ers, parish clerks, and the hangers-on of the priest- 



330 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

hood naturally took the place of their spiritual 
fathers, under whose superintendence, or, to speak 
precisely, management, the miracle-plays were 
brought out. Excluded from the church itself, 
like the strange Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, 
like that dance the miracle-play found fitting ref- 
uge in the church-yard. But it was finally for- 
bidden within all hallowed precincts, and was then 
presented upon a movable scaffold or pageant, 
which was dragged through the town, and stopped 
for the performance at certain places designated 
by an announcement made a day or two before. 
At last the presentation of these plays fell entirely 
into the hands of laymen, and handicraftsmen be- 
came their actors ; the members of the various 
guilds undertaking respectively certain plays which 
they made for the time their specialty. Thus 
the Shearmen and Taylors would represent one ; 
the Cappers another ; and so with the Smiths, the 
Skinners, the Fishmongers, and others. In the 
Chester series, Noah's flood was very appropri- 
ately assigned to the Water-dealers and Drawers 
of Dee. It is almost needless to remark, that fe- 
male characters were always played by striplings 
and young men. Women did not appear upon 
the English stage until the middle of the seven- 
teenth century. It would seem that the priests 
appeared only as amateurs, and that their perform- 
ances were gratuitous. But when laymen, or at 
least when handicraftsmen undertook the busi- 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



331 



ness, they were paid, as we know by the memo- 
randums of account still existing.* 

With regard to one place of performance and 
one play, though not in England, there has been 
preserved a record full of interest. Riccoboni gives 
in his catalogue of old printed Italian plays the 
following as the title-page of an ancient miracle- 
play : '' Delia Passione da Nostro Signore Giesu 
Christo, rapresentata il Giovedi santo nel Colish di 
Romal' — by which we see that the Coliseum, it- 
self the scene of many a Christian martyrdom, 
the place where many a disciple of Paul fought 
with wild beasts, as his teacher had fought at 
Ephesus, became in the course of a few hundred 
years the theatre on which were represented the 
life and sufferings and death of the Greatest 
Teacher, to their faith in whom those martyrs 
offered up themselves, a bloody sacrifice, in that 
vast human slaughter-house. 

Writers of chronicle and history, and sometimes 

* The following items of account are taken from one of many 
memorandums discovered by Mr. Sharp in the archives of Cov- 
entry, and published in his Essay on the Coventry Mysteries : — 

" Md. payd to the players for corpus christi daye 



Imprimis, to God 


ij' 


Itm to Cayphas 


iij' iiij* 


Itm to Heroude 


iij' iiij* 


Itm to Pilatt is \vyff 


xf 


Itm to the Bedull 


iiij"* 


Itm to one of the knights 


ij« 


Itm to the devyll and Judas 


xviij^ " 



332 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



even of family genealogy, in the Middle Ages, 
disdained to skip to the deluge, and take creation 
for granted ; and the writers of miracle-plays were 
in this respect like-minded. The disposition to 
go back to the beginning of all things is a trait 
of rude and unlettered periods. Stowe records 
the performance at London, in the year 1409, of 
a play " which lasted eight days, and was of mat- 
ter from the creation of the world," — a dramatic 
protracted meeting which quite puts to shame 
the assistance at the famous representation of 
Monte Christo in Paris ; and Lidgate wrote a se- 
ries of miracle-plays, also beginning with the cre- 
ation. Indeed, that event is the starting-point of 
two of the three great collections of English mir- 
acle-plays which have come down to us. But we 
may be sure that the writers set out from there 
only because of the difficulty of getting back far- 
ther ; and in fact the third series, the Chester, 
does begin with the fall of Lucifer, and the au- 
thors of the other two contrive to work that inci- 
dent into the play on the Creation. 

The most ancient manuscript of an English 
miracle-play yet discovered is that of one called 
The Harrowing of Hell^ which very formidable 
title, however, merely signifies the harrying, the 
invasion and spoliation of hell by Christ, — the 
event alluded to in the Apostles' Creed by the 
words, " He descended into Hell." This play is 
founded upon a passage in the apocryphal Gos- 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



333 



pel of Nicodemns, and represents the descent of 
Christ into Hell to set free Adam and Eve, Abra- 
ham, Moses, John the Baptist, and other holy per- 
sons. In it Satan enters into a discussion with 
Christ as to the injustice of carrying off his, i. e. 
Satan's, property. But Christ accomplishes his 
purpose without resistance, and binds Satan until 
the day of judgment. Indeed, in spite of its title, 
this play is of a most peaceful character, and is 
filled with words rather than action. Both lan- 
guage and versification are very rude, as may be 
seen in the following lines spoken by Christ : — 

" Helle gates y come nou to, 
And I wolle that heo un do. 
Wer ys nou this gateward ? 
Me thunketh he is a coward." 

There are a prologue, an epilogue, and ninq 
speakers. The manuscript is supposed to have 
been written about 1350.* But that date does 
not of course help us to determine when the play 
was composed, or give it priority in this respect 
to others which have been preserved in more mod- 
ern writing. The Harrowing of Hell is supposed 
with probability to have formed part of a series ; 
and its subject has its place in collections which 
from their completeness have greater interest and 
importance. 

The three sets of miracle-plays above men- 

* It is among the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum, and 
has been printed by Mr. Halliwell. 



o^A THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

tioned are known as the Towneley, the Coventry, 
and the Chester Collections. The Towneley Col- 
lection is supposed to have belonged to Widkirk 
Abbey, and is hence sometimes called the Wid- 
kirk Collection. The manuscript, in the opinion 
of Mr. Collier, is of the time of Henry VI.* The 
Coventry Collection is so called because there is 
reason to believe that it was the property of the 
Gray Friars of Coventry, who were famous for the 
performance of miracle-plays at the feast of Cor- 
pus Christi. The principal part of the manu- 
script copy extant was written in the year 1468, 
as appears by that date upon one page of the vol- 
ume.f The Chester Collection, of which there 

* The following are the subjects of the thirty plays in the Towne- 
ley series. I. The Creation and the Rebellion of Lucifer. IL 
Mactatio Abel. III. Processus Noae cum filiis. IV. Abraham. 
V. Jacob and Esau. VI. Processus Prophetarum. VII. Pha- 
rao. VIII. Caesar Augustus. IX. Annunciatio. X. Salutatio 
Elizabeths;. XL Pastorum. XII. Alia eorundem. XIII. Ob- 
latio Magorum. XIV. Fugatio Josephi et Marise in Egiptum. 
XV. Magnus Herodus. XVI. Purificatio Mariae. XVII. Jo- 
hannes Baptista. XVIII. Conspiratio Christi. XIX. Calaphi- 
satio. XX. Flagellatio. XXI. Processus Crucis. XXII. Pro- 
cessus Talentorum. XXIII. Extractio Animarum. XXIV. 
Resurrectio Domini. XXV. PeregrinL XXVI. Thomas Indias. 
XXVII. Ascensio Domini. XXVIIL Judicium. XXIX. Laz- 
arus. XXX. Suspensio Judae. 

t The Coventry series contains forty-two plays upon the fol- 
lowing subjects : — I. The Creation. IL The Fall of Man. III. 
The Death of Abel. IV. Noah's Flood. V. Abraham's Sacri- 
fice. VI. Moses and the Two Tables. VII. The Genealogy of 
Christ. VIII. Anna's Pregnancy. IX. Mary in the Temple. 
X. Mary's Betrothment. XL The Salutation and the Concep- 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



335 



are three existing manuscript copies, the oldest 
only of the year 1600, belonged to the city of 
Chester. Their author was one Randle, a monk of 
Chester Abbey.* They were played upon Whit- 
sunday by the tradesmen of that city ; and Mr. 
Markland, one of the earliest, and, in the phrase 

tion. XII. Joseph's Return. XIII. The Visit to Elizabeth 
XIV. The Trial of Joseph and Mary. XV. The Birth of Christ 
XVI. The Adoration of the Shepherds. XVI I. The Adora 
tion of the Magi. XVIII. The Purification. XIX. The Slaugh 
ter of the Innocents. XX. Christ Disputing in the Temple 
XXI. The Baptism of Christ. XXII. The Temptation. XXIII, 
The Woman taken in Adultery. XXIV. Lazarus. XXV. The 
Council of the Jews. XXVI. The Entry into Jerusalem. 
XXVII. The Last Supper. XXVIII. The Betraying of Christ. 
XXIX. King Herod. XXX. The Trial of Christ. XXXI. Pi- 
late's Wife's Dream. XXXII. The Crucifixion. XXXIIL The 
Descent into Hell. XXXIV. The Burial of Christ. XXXV. The 
Resurrection. XXXVL The Three Maries. XXXVIL Christ 
appearing to Mary Magdalen. XXXVIII. The Pilgiim of Emaus. 
XXXIX. The Ascension. XL. The Descent of the Holy Ghost. 
XLI. The Assumption. XLII. Doomsday. 

* We have the testimony of the " Banes " (i. e. banns or pro- 
logue), that this Chester series of miracle-plays was written by 
" Done Randall, moonke of Chester Abbey," ^^^th the intention 
of instructing the people in the Bible, and also of affording them 
merry entertainment. 

" This moonke, not moonke-like, in scriptures well scene, 
In storjes travilled with the best sorte ; 
In pagentes set fourthe, apparently to all eyne. 
The old and newe testament with livelye comforte ; 
Intermingling therewith, onely to make sporte. 
Some things not warranted by any writt. 
Which to gladd the hearers he would men to take yt." 

This prologue was written some time, possibly a century or more, 
after the production of the plays themselves. 



336 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



of his day, most ingenious writers upon this sub- 
ject, has pretty clearly established that they were 
first produced in 1268, four years after the estab- 
lishment of the feast of Corpus Christi, under the 
auspices of Sir John Arneway, Mayor of Chester.* 
A brief analysis of some of the plays of the 
Coventry series will give a correct notion of the 
characters of these queer compositions. A pro- 
logue in stanzas, spoken alternately by three vex- 
illators, tells in detail the subjects of the forty-two 
plays. The first, The Creation, is opened by God, 
who, after declaring in Latin that he is Alpha 
and Omega, the beginning and the end, goes on 
in English to assert his might and his triune ex- 
istence, and then announces his creative inten- 
tions. A chorus of angels then sing in Latin the 
Tibi omnes angeli, &c. of the Te Deum. Lucifer 
next appears, and asks of the angels whether they 

* The Chester series contains but twenty-four plays, upon the 
following subjects : — I. The Fall of Lucifer. II. De Creatione 
Mundi. III. De Diluvio Nose. IV. De Abrahamo, Melchise- 
dech et Lotte. V. De Mose et Rege Balak, et Balaam Propheta. 
VI. De Salutatione et Nativitate Salvatoris. VII. De Pastoribus 
greges pascentibus. VIII. De tribus Regibus Orientalibus. IX. 
De Oblatione Tertium Regum. X. De Occisione Innocentuna. 
XL De Purificatione Virginis. XII. De Tentatione Salvatoris. 
XIII. De Chelidomo et Resurrectio Lazari. XIV. De Jesu in- 
tranto domum Simeonis Leprosi. XV. De Coena Domini. XVI. 
De Passione Christi. XVII. De Descensu Christi ad Inferos. 
XVin. De Resurrectione Jesu Christi XIX. De Christo ad 
Castellum Emmaus. XX. De Ascensione Domini. XXI. De 
Electione Matthise. XXIL Ezekiel. XXIIL De Adventu An- 
tichristi. XXIV. De Judicio extremo. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



33: 



sing thus in God's honor or his, asserting that he 
is the most worthy. The good angels declare for 
God; the bad, for Lucifer. God then dooms him 
to fall from heaven to hell. Lucifer submits to 
his sentence without murmuring, and expresses 
his emotion only in a manner most likely to de- 
prive the scene of any semblance of dignity it 
might otherwise have exhibited.* 

The second play, The Fall of Man, opens with a 
speech by Adam, and a reply by Eve, in which they 
set forth their happy condition and the command 
concerning the tree of knowledge of good and evil. 
The serpent then appears and tempts Eve to vio- 
late this command. The action, if action it must 
be called, follows in the most servile manner, and 
with no expansion, the narrative in Genesis ; and 

* '■'■ Deus. Thu Lucyfere ffor thi mekyl pryde, 
I bydde the ffalle from hefne to helle ; 
And alle tho that holdyn on thi syde, 
In my blysse nevyr more to dwelle. 
At my comawndement anoon down thou slyde, 
With merthe and joye nevyr more to melle, 
In myschyf and manas evyr xalt thou abyde, 
In byttyr brennyng and fyer so felle, 
In peyn evyr to be pyht. 
" Lucyfer. At thy byddyng thi wyl I werke, 
And pas fro joy to peyne smerte, 
Now I am a devyl ful derke, 

That was an aungelle bryht. 

" Now to helle the wey I take, 

In endeles peyn ther to be pyht. 
flfor fere of fyre a fart I crake, 

In helle doonjoone myn dene is dyth." 

15 V 



338 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



Adam and Eve are expelled from Paradise.* It is 
clear that the representatives of the types of man- 
kind appeared upon the stage innocently free from 
" the troublesome disguises that we wear " ; and 
that they afterward very faithfully followed the 
Hebrew lawgiver's narrative in the use of fig- 
leaves.f It has been urged that the nakedness in 
this scene was a supposed nakedness ; that shame 
could not have been so utterly disregarded as it 
must have been had these speeches and these 
directions a literal significance. But the manners 
of the time, as they are shown in old books and 
prints, justify the acceptance of these passages in 
their plain and simple meaning. We are apt to 
forget how much of what we call shame is purely 
conventional, — as purely so as the horror of a 
Turkish woman at uncovering her face before a 

* Here is Eve's lamentation : 

" Eva. Alas ! alas ! and wele away, 
That evyr towchyd I the tre ; 
I wende as wrecche in welsom way, 
In blake busshys my boure xal be. 
In paradys is plente of pleye, 
ffayr frutys ryth gret plente. 
The satys be schet with Godys keye. 
My husbond is lost because of me. 

Leve spowse now thou fonde. 
Now stomble we on stalk and ston, 
My wyt awey is fro me gon, 
Wrythe on to my necke bon, 

With hardnesse of thin honde." 

t In the Chester miracle-play the stage direction is, "Then 
shall Adam and Eve stand nackede^ and shall not be ashamed.^'' In 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



339 



strange man. It is related in the Life of William 
Blake, the painter, a pure and good man, that a 
Mr. Butts on visiting him found him and his wife 
sitting entirely naked in the summer-house in their 
garden. He shrank back astounded ; but " Come 
in," cried Blake, " it 's only Adam and Eve, you 
know." They had been reading the Paradise 
Lost, and like the actor who blackened himself 
all over that he might more thoroughly enter into 
the character of Othello, they, to realize the situa- 
tion of Adam and Eve in Eden, had adopted the 
costume worn previous to the temptation. And 
this was no solitary instance. Blake frequently 
went naked ; so in her own room did Mrs. Blake ; 
and the children went about the house and to the 
door to admit friends naked. It may be said that 
Blake was crazy ; but his wife was not, nor were 
his children. 

the Coventry play, Adam speaks thus, immediately after he has 
eaten the apple : — 

" Adam dicet sic. 
Alas ! alas ! fFor this fals dede, 

My flesly frend my fo I fynde, 
Schameful synne doth us unhede, 

I se us nakyd before and behynde. 
Oure lordes wurd wold we not drede, 

Therfore we be now caytyvys unkynde, 
Oure pore prevytes fFor to hede, 

Summe ffygge-levys fayn wolde I fynde, 
ffor to hyde oure schame. 
Womman, ley this lefif on thi pryvyte, 
And with this leff I xal hyde me, 
Gret schame it is us nakyd to se, 

Oure lord God thus to grame. " 



340 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

In the third play, Cain and Abel, the only note- 
worthy points are, first, that Cain speaks very dis- 
respectfully of Adam and his counsels, saying that 
he cares not a haw if he never sees him ; and 
next, that, when Abel's offering is accepted and 
consumed by fire, Cain breaks out into abuse of 
him, calling him a " stinking losel." * This, by 
the way, is one of the few representations of con- 
temporary manners furnished by these miracle- 
plays. If we accept them as truthful in this re- 
gard, we must credit our forefathers with a ready 
resort to foul language when they were angered. 
Afterward, in the play on NoaJis Flood, Lamech 
calls a young man " a stinking lurdane " ; and 
in that on The Woman taken in Adultery, the 
Scribes and Pharisees call her forth to be taken 
to judgment in language far more pharisaic than 

* Cain's speech, which follows, will give a notion of the lan- 
guage and action of the play at its point of highest interest. 

" Caytn. What ? thou stynkyng losel, and is it so ? 
Doth God the love and hatyht me "i 
Thou xalt be ded, I xal the slo, 

Thi Lord thi God thou xalt nevyr se ! 
Tythyng more xalt thou nevyr do, 

With this chavyl bon I xal sle the, 
Thi deth is dyht, thi days be go, 

Out of myn handys xalt thou not fle. 
With this strok I the kylle. — 
Now this boy is slayn and dede. 
Of hym I xal nevyr more han drede ; 
He xal hereafter nevyr ete brede. 

With this gresse I xal hym hylle." 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



341 



decent.* The Towneley mystery, which repre- 
sents the first fratricide, is even more grotesque 
and indecent than that in the collection which we 
are examining. Cain comes upon the stage with 
a plough and team, and quarrels with his plough- 
boy for refusing to drive the oxen. Abel enters, 
bids speed the plough to Cain, and in reply is 
told to do something quite unmentionable. After 
Abel is killed, the boy counsels flight for fear of 
the bailiffs. Cain then makes a mock proclama- 
tion, which his boy blunderingly repeats ; and after 
this clownish foolery, Cain bids the audience fare- 
well before he goes to hell. 

The personages in the fourth play, NoaJis Floods 
are God, Noah and his wife, his three sons and their 
wives, an angel, Cain, Lamech, and a young man. 
Noah and his family talk pharisaic morality for 
about the first third of the play. God then declares 
his displeasure, and that he "wol be vengyd"; 
to which end he will destroy all the world except 
Noah and his family. The angel announces the 
coming flood to Noah, and bids him build a ship to 
save himself, his household, and "of every kyndys 

* ^^ Scriba. Come forthe, thou stotte ! com forthe, thou scowte ! 
Come forthe, thou bysmare and brothel bolde ! 
Come fforthe, thou hore, and stynkynge byche clowte ! 
How longe hast thou suche harlotry holde ? 
" Phariseus. Come forth, thou quene ! come forthe, thou scolde ! 
Com forth, thou sloveyn ! com forthe, thou slutte ! 
We xal the teche with carys colde, 
A lytyl bettyr to kepe tlii kutte." 



342 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



bestes a cowpyl." Noah and his family go out to 
build the ship, and Lamech enters blind, and con- 
ducted by a young man. In spite of his infirmity, 
at the suggestion of his guide, he shoots at a sup- 
posed beast in a bush ; but, like another hapless 
person known to rhyme who " bent his bow," he 
hits what he did not shoot at, and kills Cain, who 
mysteriously happens to be in the bush. Aroused 
to wrath, and moved by fear of the fate predicted 
of him who should slay Cain, Lamech kills the 
young man who had misled him into shooting at 
the beast. He goes out, and Noah comes in with 
his ship, — '' et stathn intrat Noe cum iiavi cantan- 
tes." This ship, as we learn from the direction in 
the corresponding play of the Chester Mysteries, 
was customarily painted over with figures of the 
beasts supposed to be within, as if they had struck 
through and come out like an eruption.* In that 
play, too, and also in the corresponding Towneley 
play, Noah's wife refuses to enter the ark. In- 
deed, in these plays she is represented as an ar- 
rant scold. In the first scene she berates Noah, 

* " Then Noe shall goe into the arke with all his familye, his 
wife excepte. The arke must be boarded round about, and up- 
pon the hordes all the beastes and fowles hereafter rehearsed must 
be painted, that there wordes maye agree with the pictures." To 
Noah's request that she will come into the ark, his wife, in the 
Chester play, thus replies : — 

" Yea sir set up your saile, 
And rowe forth with evil haile, 
For withouten anie saile 

I will not out of this toune. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



343 



who gives her as good as she sends, and both 
swear roundly by the Virgin Mary ; and as to 
going into the ark, the patriarch, "the secunde 
fathyr," as he styles himself, edifies the female part 
of the audience by fairly flogging his wife into it 
with a cart-whip. The flood comes on, (we have 
returned to the Coventry plays,) Noah and his 
family speak thirty lines of dialogue, and then he 
says : — 

" XI.'' days and nyghtes hath lasted this rayn, 

And xl." days this grett flood begynnyth to slake ; 
This crowe xal I sende out to seke sum playn, 
Good tydynges to brynge, this massage I make." 

The crow does not return, and the dove is sent, 
" qua redeimte cum ramo viride olivce," as the 
stage direction says, Noah and his family leave 
the ark, singing, " 3Iai'e vidit etfiigit,'' &c. 

The fourteenth play, which represents the Trial 
of yoseph and Mary on accusations based upon 
the latter's mysterious pregnancy, is opened by a 
crier, who summons the jurors, and people who 

** But I have my gossepes everich one, 
One foot further I will not gone ; 
They shal not drown by St. John, 
And I may save ther life. 

" They loved me ful well by Christ ; 
But thou will let them in thi chist, 
Ellis row forth, Noe, when thou list 
And get thee a newe wife." 

But Noah neither lets them in his chist, nor gets him a new 
wife. 



344 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



have causes, to come into court. Although the 
trial is supposed, of course, to take place in Pales- 
tine before the Christian era, it is presided over 
by " my lorde the buschop," and the people sum- 
moned are Englishfolk of the lower class, whose 
surnames have plainly been given to them on ac- 
count of their occupation or their personal traits. 
The crier lets us into a judge's secret, by warning 
those who have causes to be tried to put money 
in their purses, or their cause may speed the 
worse.* In the next play, which is entitled The 

* " Den, Avoyd, seres, and lete my lorde the buschop come, 
And syt in the courte the lawes ffor to doo ; 
And I xal gon in this place them for to somowne, 

Tho that ben in my book the com't se must com too. 
I warne 30W here alle abowte, 
That I somown 30W alle the rowte, 
Loke je fayl, for no dowte, 

At the court to pere. 
Bothe John Jurdon, and Geffrey Gyle, 
Malkyn Mylkedoke, and fayr Mabyle, 
Stevyn Sturdy, and Jak at the Style, 
And Sawdyr Sadelere. 

" Thom Tynkere and Betrys Belle, 
Peyrs Potter and Whatt at the Welle, 
Symme Smalfeyth and Kate Kelle, 

And Bertylmew the Bochere. 
Kjrtt Cakelere and Colett Crane, 
Gylle Fetyse and fayr Jane, 
Powle Pewterere and Pernel Prane, 

And Phelypp the good Flecchere. 

" Cok Crane and Davy Drydust, 
Luce Lyere and Letyce Lytyltrust, 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



345 



Birth of Christ, Mary, as she and Joseph are on 
their way to Bethlehem, longs for cherries from a 
tree which they pass. Joseph is old, lazy, and 
huffish, and tells her that the tree is too high, 
and that he may get her cherries who got her 
with child. Whereupon Mary prays for the cher- 
ries, and the boughs bend down to her ; at which 
sight Joseph repents.* Plainly there were prop- 
Miles the Myllere and Colle Crakecrust, 

Bothe Bette the Bakere, and Robyn Rede. 

And loke 3e ryngewele in sour purs, 

ffor ellys 30ur cawse may spede the wurs, 

Thow that se slynge Goddys curs 

Evyn at myn hede, ffast com away. 

Bothe Boutyng the Browstere, and Sybyly Slynge, 

Megge Merywedyr and Sabyn Sprynge, 

Tyffany Twynkelere, ffayle ffor nothynge, 
The courte xal be this day." 

* " Maria. Now, my spowse, I pray 30W to behold, 
How the cheryes growj^n upon 3on tre ; 
flfor to have therof ryght ffayn I wold, 

And it plesyd 30W to labore so meche for me. 
" Joseph. 30ur desyre to ffulfylle I xal assay sekyrly, 

Ow to plucke 30W of these cheries ; it is a werk wylde, 
ffor the tre is so hy3 it wol not be lyghtly, 

Therfore lete hym pluk 30W cheryes begatt 30W with childe. 
" Maria. Now, good Lord, I pray the graunt me this boun, 
To have of these cheries, and it be 30ur wylle : 
Now, I thank it God, this tre bowyth to me downe ! 
I may now gaderyn anowe, and etyn my ffylle. 
" Josephe. Ow, I know weyl I have offendyd my God in Trinyte, 
Spekyng to my spowse these unkynde wurdys ; 
ffor now I beleve wel it may non other be, 

But that my spowse beryght the kyngys son of blys ; 
He help us now at oure nede ! " 
15* 



34^ 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



erties, and even machinery, upon the stage at this 
rude and early period ; and indeed the Usts of 
properties (for they seem always to have been 
so called) which have been preserved, show that 
no small pains were taken to portray the glories 
and the horrors of the various scenes presented, 
and especially in the imitations of such miracu- 
lous events as that of the bowing down of the 
branches of the cherry-tree. 

The seventeenth play. The Adoration of the 
Magi, introduces the most famous character in 
these dramas, Herod. He is always represented 
in them, not only as wicked and cruel, but as a 
tremendous braggart. He raves and swaggers 
and swears without stint ; his favorite oath being 
by Mahound, i. e. Mohammed ; for in all respects 
these miracle-plays set chronology at defiance. 
The speeches put into his mouth more than any 
others are written in the old Anglo-Saxon alliter- 
ative style, of which Piers Ploughman s Vision 
is a well-known example.* Herod, in spite of 

* Perhaps the most characteristic speech of his, in every re- 
spect, is the following from The Slaughter of the Innocents. 
" Herodes Rex. I ryde on my rowel ryche in my regne, 
Rybbys fful reed with rape xal I sende ; 
Popetys et paphawkes I xal puttyn in peyne, 
With my spere prevyn, pychyn, and to-pende. 
' The gowys with gold crownys gete thei nevyr ageyn, 
To seke tho sottys sondys xal I sende ; 
Do howlott howtyn hoberd and heyn. 

Whan here barnys blede undyr credyl bende ; 
Sharply I xal hem shende ! 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. ^47 

his heathenism, his cruelty, his profanity, and his 
braggadocio, perhaps by reason of them, used to 
be a favorite character with young men of spirit 
and parts who were stage-struck. Chaucer, it 

The knave childeryn that be 
In alle Israel countre, 
Thei xul have blody ble, 

fFor on I calde unkende. 

" It is tolde in Grw, 
His name xulde be Jhesu 

I-fownde. 
To have hym 3e gon, 
Hewe the flesche with the bon, 

And gyff hym wownde ! 
Now kene knyghtes, kythe sour craftys, 

And kyllyth knave chylderyn and castyth hem in clay; 
Shewyth on 30ur shulderes scheldys and schaftys, 

Shapyht amonge schel chowthys ashyrlyng shray ; 
Doth rowncys rennyn with rakynge raftys, 

Tyl rybbys be to rent with a reed ray ; 
Lete no barne beleve on bete baftys, 
Tyl a beggere blede be bestys baye 
Mahound that best may ; 
I warne 30W my knyghtes, 
A barn is born I plyghtys, 
Wolde clymbyn kynge and kyknytes, 
And lett my lordly lay. 

" Knyghtys wyse, 
Chosyn ful chyse, 
Aryse ! aryse ! 

And take 30ur tolle ! 
And every page 
Of ij. 3ere age, 
Or evyr 3e swage, 

Sleythe ilke a fool. 



348 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



will be remembered, says, in the Miller's Tale, of 
his " Absolon that joly was and gay" : 

*' Sometime to shew his lightness and maistrie 
He plaieth Herode on a skaffolde hie." * 

But more than by the indecency, the coarse- 
ness, the bombast, and the vapidity of these mira- 
cle-plays, we are astonished and repelled by the 
degrading familiarity with which they treat the 
most awful and most moving incidents of the 
Gospel history. The Last Supper was actually 

" On of hem alle 
Was born in stalle, 
ffolys hym calle 

Kynge in crowne. 
With byttyr galle, 
He xalle down falle, — 
My myght in halle 

Xal nevyr go down." 

* Absolon was parish-clerk; but the costume and habits of 
some of the lay gallants who played Herod is set forth in the fol- 
lowing passage, spoken by the Devil in the twenty-fifth play, The 
Council of the Jews. It has no dramatic significance, but is an 
interesting and doubtless a truthful portraiture of the period, 
even as to the side-locks that " harbor quick beasts that tickle 
men." 

" Byholde the dyvercyte of my dysg}^syd varyauns, 
Eche thyng sett of dewe nateralle dysposycion, 
And eche parte acordynge to his resemblauns, 
£fro the sool of the ffoot to the hyest asencion. 

" Off ffyne cordewan a goodly peyre of long pekyd schon ; 
Hosyn enclosyd of the most costyous cloth of crenseyn ; 
Thus a bey to a jentylman to make comperycion, 

With two doseyn poyntys of cheverelle, the aglottes of sylver 
feyn. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



349 



played ; the Crucifixion was actually played ; and 
even the Resurrection was not too sacred or mys- 
terious a subject to be represented. Conforming 
both to the religious spirit and the taste of the 
time, the clerical dramatist spared his audience 
the sight of no indignity, of no torture, suffered 
by Christ ; but took delight in representing all 
the physical circumstances attending his death 
with gross and audacious particularity.* 

" A shert of feyn Holond, but care not for the payment ; 
A stomachere of clere reynes the best may be bowth ; 
Thow poverte be chef, lete pride ther be present. 

And alle tho that repreff pride, thou sette hem at nowth. 

" Cadace wolle or flokkys, where it may be sowth. 

To stufife withal thi dobbelet, and make the of proporcyon ; 
Two smale legges and a gret body, thow it ryme nowth, 
set loke that thou desyre to an the newe faccion. 

" A gowne of thre serdys, loke thou make comparison, 
Unto alle degrees dayly that passe thin astat ; 
A purse withoutyn mony, a daggere for devoscyon ; 
And there repref is of synne, loke thou make debat. 

" With syde lokkys I schrewe thin here to thi colere hangyng 
downe. 
To herborwe qweke bestys that tekele men onyth ; 
An hey smal bonet for curyng of the crowne, 

And alle beggeres and pore pepyll have hem in dyspyte. 
Onto the grete othys and lycherye gyf thi delyte ; 

To maynteyn thin astate lete brybory be present ; 
And yf the lawe repreve the, say thou wylt ffyth, 
And gadere the a felachep after thin entent." 

* The following passage, it will be seen, shows that the Cruci- 
fixion was represented even to the minutest of its attendant cir- 
cumstances : — 



350 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



And as we close our examination of the mira- 
cle-plays a reflection of their mingled childishness 

" Than xul thei pulle yhesu out of his clothis, and leyn them to- 
gedyr ; and ther thei xul pullyjt hym down and leytt along on the 
cros, and after that Jiaylyn hym thereon. 

^^ Primus Judceus. Come on now here, we xal asay 
Yf the cros for the be mete ; 
Cast hym down here in the devyl way, 
How long xal he standyn on his fete ? 

" Secundics Jicdceus. Pul hym down, evyl mote he the ! 
And gyf me his arm in hast ; 
And anon we xal se 

Hese good days thei xul be past ! 

" Tertitis Judceus. Gef hese other arm to me, — 
Another take hed to hese feet ; 
And anon we xal se 

Yf the borys be for hym meet. 

" Quartus Judceus. This is mete, take good hede ; 
Pulle out that arm to the sore. 
Primus Judceus. This is short, the devyl hym sped, 
Be a large fote and more. 

" Secundus Judceus. ffest on a rop and pulle hym long, 
And I xal drawe the ageyn ; 
Spare we not these ropys strong, 
Thow we brest both flesch and veyn ! 

" Tertius Judceus. Dryve in the nayle anon, lete se, 
And loke and the flesch and sennes welle last. 
Quartus Judceics. That I graunt, so mote I the ; 
Lo ! this nayl is dreve ryth wel and fast. 

" Primics Judceus. ffest a rope than to his feet, 
And drawe hym down long anow. 
Secundus Judceus. Here is a nayl for both good and greet, 
I xal dryve it thorwe, I make a vow ! 

" Here xule thei leve of and dawncyn abowte the cros shortly.'''' 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



351 



and temerity must be uppermost in the mind of 
every reader. Had it not been done, it would 
seem almost impossible that such subjects could 
be so unworthily treated by men of sense and ed- 
ucation, which the better class of Roman Catholic 
priests were, even in the days when these plays 
were written. Here were the grandest themes 
handled by authors to whom they were matters 
of religious faith and supreme concern ; and all 
that was done was to degrade, to beUttle, and to 
make ridiculous. The rudeness of the people for 
whose instruction and pleasure the miracle-plays 
were produced, and the gross and material char- 
acter of religion at that day, account, in a great 
measure, for this shocking contrast between sub- 
ject and treatment. But yet it would seem that, 
though rude and simple, these compositions might 
have preserved some touch of the spirit of the 
Hebrew writers from whom their subjects were 
taken, and who themselves wrote for a people 
only a little advanced beyond the pale of semi- 
barbarism. And one subject, by remarkable co- 
incidence, was treated with a certain degree of 
simplicity and pathos by the writers of all of the 
three great collections of English miracle-plays. 
This was the story of Abraham and Isaac. And 
it is worthy of special remark, that it was a sub- 
ject of which the interest is purely human, or at 
least that part of the subject in question which 
exhibited paternal love on the one side and filial 



nc2 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

love and devotion on the other, which raised all 
these writers out of their slough of coarseness and 
buffoonery into the region of healthy sentiment. 
The Coventry series, which we have been exam- 
ining, offers the best treatment of this incident ; 
which in itself, and in the barest relation of it, 
is, if one can repress an outbreak of rebellious 
indignation and disbelief, the most pathetic and 
heart-breaking told in all the Hebrew Scriptures. 
With an extract from this composition, which I 
shall put into modern language, I shall close this 
notice of English miracle-plays. 

" Isaac. All ready father, even at your will, 

And at your bidding I am you by 
With you to walk over dale and hill, 

At your calling I am ready. 
To the father ever most comely 

It behoveth the child ever obedient to be ; 
I will obey, full heartily, 

To everything that ye bid me. 

^^ Abraham. Now, son, in thy neck this fagot thou take 

And this fire bear in thy hand, 
For we must now sacrifice go make, 

Even after the will of God's command. 
Take this burning brand, 

My sweet child, and let us go ; 
There may no man that liveth upon land 

Have more sorrow than I have woe. 

" Isa. Father, father, you go right still, 

I pray now, father, speak unto me. 
Abra. My good child, what is thy will ? 

Tell me thy heart, I pray to thee. 
Isa. Father, fire and wood here is plenty, 

But I can see no sacrifice j 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. ^,$3 

What ye will offer fain would I see, 
That it were done at best advice. 

^^Abra. God shall that ordain that is in heaven, 

My sweet son, for this offering ; 
A dearer sacrifice may no man name 

Than this shall be, my dear darling. 
Isa. Let be, dear father, your sad weeping, 

Your heavy looks aggrieve me sore. 
Tell me, father, your great mourning, 

And I shall seek some help therefor 

** Abra. Alas ! dear son, for needs must me 

Even here thee kill, as God hath sent ; 
Thine o\\ti father thy death must be, — 

Alas that ever this bow was bent ! 
With this fire bright thou must be brent ; 

An angel said to me right so ; 
Alas ! my child, thou shalt be shent ! 

Thy careful father must be thy foe. " 

Isaac yields to what Abraham tells him is the 
Divine command, which yet he says makes his 
heart " cling and cleave as clay." 

^^ Isa. Yet work God's will, father, I you pray, 
And slay me here anon forthright ; 
And turn from me your face away. 

My head when that you shall off smite. 

" Abra. Alas ! dear son, I may not choose, 

I must needs here my sweet son kill ; 
My dear darling now must me lose, 

Mine own heart's blood now shall I spill. 
Yet this deed ere I fulfil, 

My sweet son, thy mouth I kiss. 
Isa. All ready, father, even at your will 

I do your bidding, as reason is. 

" Abra. Alas ! dear son, here is no grace, 
But need is dead now must thou be. 

w 



354 'A^HE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

With this kerchief I hide thy face ; 

In the time that I slay thee 
Thy lovely visage would I not see, 

Not for all this world's good." 

It is true that the incident here represented is 
in itself the most touching that can be conceived ; 
but the author of the play has amplified and 
worked out the very brief account in Genesis in 
a dialogue which, rude although it be, is natural, 
simple, and touching. The conditions of the 
action are monstrous and incredible, if we leave 
out the supernatural element ; and the situation, 
unrelieved by the ever-present consciousness that 
the sacrifice is not to be made, would be too heart- 
rending for contemplation. But an unquestioning 
belief in the supernatural, even to the literal ac- 
ceptance of the figurative style and extravagant 
phraseology of the Orient, was assumed by the 
writers of miracle-plays. The son's love, sub- 
mission, and self-devotion, and the father's an- 
guish, are expressed with tenderness and truth. 
Abraham's silent woe as they walk together is 
exhibited with really dramatic power in Isaac's 
exclamation, " Father, father, ye go right still " ; 
and Abraham's reply, "Tell me thy heart," and 
his after exclamation, "Alas that ever this bow 
was bent ! " are full of pathos. And when at last 
the child tells the father to do God's will, yet begs 
him to turn away his face when he strikes, and 
Abraham kisses his son and hides from his own 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



355 



eyes the boy's lovely visage, the interest is wrought 
up to such a pitch that supernatural intervention 
is indignantly demanded by the holiest instincts 
of that very nature which supernatural interven- 
tion has so pitilessly outraged. 

It is worthy of remark, that the most interest- 
ing story related in the Hebrew Scriptures, and 
that best suited for dramatic representation, the 
story of Joseph, appears in neither of the English 
series of miracle-plays. There is, however, a very 
formidable French play upon the subject, one an- 
cient copy of which exists, printed in Gothic let- 
ter. It is entitled Moralite de la Vendition de 
yoseph* 

The personages of this drama are forty-nine in 
number. The list includes, beside Jacob, Joseph 
and his eleven brothers, Pharaoh, Potiphar and 
his wife, and the officers or attendants of their 
households, among whom of course are Pharaoh's 

* " Moralite de la vendition de Joseph filz du patriarche Jacob, 
comment ses freres esmeuz par envye, sassemblerent pour le faire 
mourir, mais par le vouloir de Dieu apres lavoir piteusement oul- 
trage le devalerent en une cisterne, et enfin le vendirent a des 
marchans gallatides et ysmaelites, lequelz de rechief le vendirent 
a Putifard en egypte ou il fut au prez de Pharaon Roy dudict 
egipte. Lequel fut tempte de luxure par plusieurs jours de sa 
maistresse a laquelle il laissa son manteau et senfouit, dequoy il 
en fut en prison, mais peu de temps apres il interpreta les songes 
de Pharaon, Et a faict si bonne pulsion en egipte qil a este diet 
et appelle le saulveur de tout le pays, comme plus amplement 
est escript en la saincte bible au trenseptieme et douze aultres 
chapitres en suyvant du livre de genese. Et est ledict Joseph 
figure de la vendition de nostre saulueur Jhesucrist." 



35^ 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



chief buticr and chief baker, a certain King Cor- 
delamor, unknown to the Hebrew story, with his 
attendants, and also three allegorical personages, 
Envy, Pity, and Justice, and finally God himself. 
This play was produced about the end of the fif- 
teenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century. 
The only ancient copy known to exist was printed 
about 1 5 30. Ninety copies were printed in fac-sim- 
ile, in 1835, at the expense of the Prince d'Essling. 
The introduction of King Cordelamor indicates a 
great advance by the author of this play in the 
art of dramatic construction. The story as it is 
told in Genesis gives no reason, either for the im- 
prisonment of Pharaoh's chief butler and chief 
baker, or for the hanging of the latter and the 
pardon of the former, — the very incidents upon 
which the whole story turns, and by which Jo- 
seph's elevation is brought about. This reason 
the author of the French play furnishes ; or, in 
other words, he undertakes to supply a motive for 
the action of his drama. King Cordelamor opens 
the play by announcing, with an amusing confu- 
sion of geographical lines, that he has for a long 
time desired to conquer and destroy Babylon, 
which, with all the realm of Egypt, is justly his, 
although it is held by the usurper Pharaoh, who 
obtained it Cordelamor does not know exactly 
how. 

" Tout le pays egipcien 
Selon raison doubt estre mien 
Pharaon la possession 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 357 

En tient, et le dit estre sien 
Par ie ne scay quel fol moyen 
Quil a par usurpation 
Car par droicte succession 
Je doy la domination." 

A Centurion, in whose hearing he utters his com- 
plaints, says that he knows a way of accompHsh- 
ing the desired end, which, although quite proper, 
is not strictly honorable. 

" Je scay ung moyen conuenable 
Mais il nest pas fort honnorable. " 

Cordelamor takes the idea at once, and says that 
Pharaoh must be poisoned. 

*' II le faudroit empoysonner 
Et luy donner en trahison 
En son manger quelque poyson 
Qui tout le cueur luy creueroit." 

But, says a Decurion, " Who will give it to him ? 
there is the difficulty." The ready Centurion 
says that the usurper's baker and butler must be 
bribed to do the deed. 

" II fauldroit a son pennetier 
Et a son bouteillier parler 
Et a segret les apeller 
Promettre les mons et les vaulx 
Or et argent chiens et oyseaulx 
Mais quilz vous voulsissent promettre 
A estre traistres a leur maistre 
Et luy bailler a son breuaige 
En son pain ou en son potaige 
Quelque grant poyson mortifere." 

Cordelamor sends the Decurion into Egypt to 



358 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



accomplish this purpose, and he goes, saying that 
his master shall hear from him in two days. And 
here the rudeness of the stage, and the ease with 
which the imagination of the audience enabled 
the dramatist to defy the unities of time and place, 
appear. The previous dialogue has been spoken 
upon the staging or pageant. Now the stage di- 
rection is, " Pausa. Reced. et dicat," — "A pause. 
He comes down and says." — What he says is that 
he sees one of Pharaoh's people near yonder door. 
The person is the chief baker ; who, being tempt- 
ed, consents. After the conference, another pause 
and the ascent of the Decurion are directed. 
"Pausa. Decurion ascend." The Decurion re- 
ports his success, and Cordelamor promises the 
Decurion and the Centurion that, if he ever pos- 
sess Egypt, they shall be his best rewarded friends 
and counsellors. Then a little pause, " Pausa par- 
va," is directed, and the Chief Baker soliloquizes, 
saying that he must get the Chief Butler into the 
plot. Pharaoh then appears and gives his " Mais- 
tre d'hotel " orders for a great feast to all his lords 
and chivalry. Then Jacob and his sons appear. 
Jacob has a long speech, beginning, 

" O haulte deite 
Parfaicte auctorite 
Plaine de dignite 
Humblement je rends grace 
A vostre majeste 
Qui mon antiquite 
Par grand felicite 
Comforte en ceste place." 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



359 



In this speech the patriarch, with a knowledge 
of geography rivalling that of King Cordelamor, 
recounts the incidents of the dream and the angels* 
ladder, which took place as he was on his way to 
"the city of Mesopotamia." In this scene the 
jealousy of Joseph and Benjamin on the part of 
their ten brothers is developed, and Jacob gives 
the former the coat of many colors, — " la robe 
polimite." Another pause is directed, with the 
descent of all the sons to the ground, except Jo- 
seph and Benjamin, who are directed to remain. 
Then, apparently upon another scaffold. Pity and 
Justice have a long conference with God, in which 
God, who acts through the play as a sort of cho- 
rus, announces that he intends that Joseph's expe- 
rience and fate shall typify that of Jesus Christ. 
Another pause ; and Judah soliloquizes his envy 
of Joseph on account of "la belle robe polimite." 

" Une robe que le grant diable 
y ait sa part est bien donne." 

Again a pause ; and God commands dreams to 
visit Joseph. 

" Des songes pour clariffier 
Mes sainctes predications 
Grandes sermociations." 

After another pause, Joseph tells his dream. The 
consequences are of course those told in the origi- 
nal story. Judah exclaims : 

**Quoy, faire Roy de ce garson 
Le grant dyable denfer memport 



360 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

Se mieulx nameroys estre mort 
Quant a ma part que ie lendure." 

Joseph and his brothers go home by remounting 
the scaffold. " Les filz montent es eschaffaulx et 
ioseph remonte." Envy soon afterward appears, 
and thus describes herself as a mingling of covet- 
ousness, malice, and slander, in a passage of no 
little delicacy and spirit : — 

" La haine ie croistray bien souef 
Car ie scay bien tourner la clef 
De tout vetil 

Dequoy il en viendra meschef 
Car de tous maulx ie suis Ie chef 
Par mon babil. 

Jen ay fait mourir plus de niil 
Et mettre plusieurs en exil 
Quant ie me fume. 
II nest homme tant soit subtil 
Qui osast leuer Ie sourcil 
cest ma coustume. 

II nest homme que ie ne plume 
Amours damys ie boy et hume 
comme brouet. 

Legiere suys comme une pleume 
Et pesant comme une enclume 
Eu vng paquet. 

Quant il deslye mon caquet 
Ma langue va comme vng traquet 
Sans nul arrest. 

Plustost elle tourne que vng rouet 
Plus souple que nest vng fouet 
Quant il me plaist." 

Envy approaches Joseph's brethren, and in a 
long interview, and with much subtlety, incites 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



361 



them to Joseph's destruction, and they all, except 
Reuben, agree to slay him. Jacob sends his son 
with "la belle robe polimite" to seek his breth- 
ren. The student of language will observe in 
these lines evidence of the great antiquity of 
this composition : — 

" Touteffois ioseph il te fault 
Aller en sichen bas ou hault 
Scavoir ou ilz sont, car ie craing 
Quil ne leur soit venu besoing 
Vaten veoir comme tout se porte." 

So also, in the following speeches upon Joseph's 
appearance among his brethren, like indications : — 

" Juda Ho bon guet, voicy le songeart 
Que tout lemond se evertue 
Davoir bon cueur 

" Ruben Jay graut regart 
Ad ce fait 

" yuda II fault quon le tue 
Remyde nya 

" Ruben Sang a me mue 

Car le cas est fort inhumain 
Humanite me redargue 

" Juda Chya chya cest a demain 

A luy premier mettray le main 
Nostre conclusion est telle." 

Joseph is enthroned in mockery ; his scoffing 
brethren bow down to him ; he is buffeted by 
each in turn, and, having been bound to a column, 
scourged. The Ishmaelites, who are accompanied 
by their Prince, now enter, not upon the scaffold, 
16 



362 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

but the ground ; for they come with beasts laden 
with merchandise. The stage directions are very 
particular : " Nota que icy ilz ont des cheuaulx 
et bestes chargez de marchandises. Ilz charge 
leur cheuaulx." Afterward, when the Prince is 
about to appear, " Icy fault que le prince soyt 
prest"; and again, when the bargain for Joseph 
is struck, " II fault icy vingt deniers." Pharaoh 
gives his feast ; but the dishes are hardly placed 
upon the table when the King's physician detects 
poison in some of them. The Chief Baker is ac- 
cused, and he accuses the Chief Butler ; and both 
are put under guard, and afterward thrown into 
prison. The Ishmaelites, arriving in Egypt, sell 
Joseph to Potiphar for thirty pieces of silver. 
Here Joseph's boyhood is brought to a close by 
a stage direction : " ^ La fin du petit ioseph." 
Thus far the part was doubtless played by a lad ; 
afterward by a man, when the direction is given, 
"^Joseph le grant commence." Potiphar soon 
expresses to Joseph before his wife his entire con- 
fidence in him, and then goes on a short journey. 
Here a pause is directed, because, it is said, Joseph 
should absent himself from the barrier, i. e. the 
front of the staging, — " Pausa, car ioseph se doibt 
absenter de la barriere," — the occasion being a 
confession in soliloquy, by Mrs. Potiphar, how 
much she is enamored of her husband's steward. 
Hereafter the play follows the story with great 
exactness, but also with great expansion. King 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA, 



363 



Cordelamor, having fulfilled his function, on learn- 
ing the miscarriage of his plot, disappears from the 
scene. Joseph is tempted by his mistress in the 
bluntest possible language, and with much repe- 
tition, and in reply preaches to her in the most 
edifying manner. When he is taken to prison, 
the sergeant who has him in charge tells the jailer 
of what he is accused, upon which the latter slan- 
derously remarks : 

" Sil est vray ce seroit mal fait 
Mais ainsi que ie puis comprendre 
Femmes peuent donne a entendre 
Des faulcetez aulcuneffoys. " 

The baker is hanged before the eyes of the audi- 
ence upon a gallows, "en forme de croix poten- 
cer," and afterward cut down. Joseph's triumph 
and the gathering in of the corn seem to have 
been represented with great care for what may be 
called scenic effect, if we may judge by the partic- 
ularity of the stage directions ; and much help 
to the imagination of the audience was plainly 
looked for from the separation of the actors by 
the staging. The directions, " Estant a terre dit," 
and "II remont en hault," are of very frequent 
occurrence. The play follows the events of 
Joseph's life down to the burial of Jacob. Its 
length is enormous. It contains nearly eight 
thousand lines ; twice as many as Hamlet. 

An examination of this French moralite, so 
called, is not strictly in place in an account of the 



3^4 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



English stage, upon which it was not presented 
either in translation or by imitation. But the na- 
ture of its subject connected it with the miracle- 
plays, from which we are about to part ; and the 
peculiarity of its construction, its interesting and 
novel admixture of character, the particularity of 
its stage directions, and the evident splendor and 
faithfulness to reality with which it was per- 
formed, connect it also with that period of our 
drama to the consideration of which we are about 
to pass, and have induced me to bring it — and it 
is here brought for the first time, I believe — to 
the attention of the English reader. 



II. 



Rude, gross, and childish as the miracle-plays 
were, they yet contained the germ of our drama ; 
and from them its development, slow but never 
checked, can be traced up to the sudden and 
splendid maturity of the Elizabethan era. The 
Coventry series, which we have just been examin- 
ing, differs from the Towneley and the Chester 
series by the introduction of allegorical characters 
into some of the plays. In the earlier miracle- 
plays the personages all belonged to the religious 
history the course of which they were written 
to teach ; and the author confined his work to 
the putting of Scriptural story or saintly legend 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



365 



into the form of dialogue and soliloquy. But as 
time wore on, virtues, vices, and even modes of 
mental action, were impersonated, and mingled 
upon the pageant or the scaffold with patriarchs, 
apostles, and saints. Thus the eighth of the Cov- 
entry series, TJie Barrenness of Anna, is opened 
with a kind of prologue or introductory chorus 
by Contemplation, a character which reappears 
in the series ; and in The Salutation and Con- 
ception, the Virtues, collectively embodied, with 
Truth, Pity, and Justice, perform functions like 
those of the Greek chorus. At last, in The 
Slaughter of the InnocentSy Death i^Mors) takes 
part in the action ; and in some of the other 
plays, impersonal Detractors, Accusers, and Con- 
solers also appear. In the three Digby miracle- 
plays * there is one founded upon the life of Mary 
Magdalen, which is interesting in this respect. 
And in the first of the set, which represents the 
conversion of St. Paul, it is noteworthy that, of 
two devils who are among the characters, one is 
named Belial and the other Mercury ! The first 
is instructed to enter thus : " Here to enter a 
Dyvel with thunder and fyre, and to avaunce hym 
selfe, saying as folowyth ; and his spech spoken, to 
syt downe in a chayre." While he is thus making 
himself comfortably at home in a devilish way, 

* So called because they are preserved among the Digby 
MSS. in the Bodleian Library. See Collier's A?i7ials of t/ie 
Stage, Sec, Vol. H. p. 230. 



366 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



and complaining of the lack of news, his attend- 
ant or messenger comes in, according to this di- 
rection : " Here shall entere a nother devyll, called 
Mercury, with a fyering, coming in hast, cryeing 
and rorying." After a consultation as to the 
bad way their friend Saul appears to be in, to 
wit, peril of salvation body and soul, they both 
"vanyshe away with a fyrye flame and a tem- 
pest." * The play on the Life of Mary Magdalen, 
rather a late miracle-play, was intended to be a 
spectacle of unusual attraction. It required four 
pageants or scaffolds. Tiberius, Herod, Pilate, 
and the Devil, personages of apparently equal 
dramatic dignity, had each his own station before 
the audience, and the entrance of the last is thus 
directed : " Here shal entyr the prynce of dev- 
ylls in a stage, and hell onder neth that stage." 
Indeed, the representation of hell, or of hell- 
mouth, into which demons and their victims were 
sent, was a standing, and, it would seem, a much 
prized, scenic effect in the performance of the 
miracle-plays. In the account-books of the ex- 
penses of the Coventry plays there are many 
charges for " the repayring of hel-mought." f To 
return to the play of Mary Magdalen, — a ship ap- 
pears between the scaffolds ; the mariners spy the 
castle of Mary, which the Devil and the Seven 
Deadly Sins besiege and capture. Lechery ad- 

* Collier, as above. 

t Sharpe's Dissertation on the Coventry Mysteries, 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



367 



dresses the heroine in a speech, the following ex- 
tract from which will give a notion of the style 
of the composition : — 

" Hayl, lady, most lawdabyll of alyauns ! 
Heyl, orient as the sonne in his reflexite ! 
Much pepul be comfortyd be your benygnant affyauns ; 
Brighter than the bornyd is your bemys of bewte : 
Most debonarius with your aungelly velycyte." 

The appearance of the Seven Deadly Sins and 
of the Kings of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil 
in this play, as ten distinct characters, is not only 
very curious, but is a noteworthy step toward the 
next stage of our drama, which now took the al- 
legorical form of the Moral-Play. Of character 
and action, in a true dramatic sense, the miracle- 
plays, with one or two exceptions to be noticed 
hereafter, had really none. The personages came 
upon the stage and described themselves, giving a 
dry catalogue of their qualities, conditions, and 
relations, and then went formally through the 
speech and action prescribed for them in Scrip- 
ture or legend. But when allegorical personages 
began to multiply, as they did, in the miracle- 
plays, they began also to interfere with and modi- 
fy this slavish adherence to Scripture story and 
Church tradition ; until finally these personages, 
who, it will be seen upon a moment's reflection, 
represent an extraneous human element, and are 
in fact a clumsy embodiment alternately of the 
mental conditions of the other characters and of 



368 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

the audience, obtained possession of the stage, and 
completely expelled the angels, saints, and patri- 
archs, in aid of whose waning power to interest 
the people they had been created. 

In a moral-play pure and simple, the person- 
ages are all embodiments of abstract ideas, and 
the motive of the play is the enforcement of moral 
truth as a guide of human conduct. The abstract 
ideas may be virtues, as Justice, Mercy, Compas- 
sion ; or vices, as Avarice, Malice, Falsehood ; or 
a state, condition, or mode of life, as Youth, Old 
Age, Poverty, Abominable Living ; or an embodi- 
ment of the human race, as in the character Every 
Man in the moral-play of that name ; or of a part 
of it, as in the play of Lusty Juvenilis ; or of the 
end of all men, for in these compositions Death 
itself is not unfrequently embodied. But there 
were two permanent, and, so to speak, stock char- 
acters, which were as essential to a moral-play as 
Harlequin and Columbine to an old pantomime. 
These were the Devil and the Vice ; the former 
being an inheritance from the miracle-plays, but 
the latter a new creation. Exactly why and how 
this personage came into being with the moral- 
play, we do not know ; but may it not have been 
with the purpose of having ever present an em- 
bodied antithesis to the motive of the play, — 
morality } That the name was derived from the 
nature of the character would seem manifest with- 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



369 



out a word, were it not that other and fantastic 
derivations have been suggested.* The Devil was 
represented as the hideous monster evolved by the 
morbid religious imagination of the dark ages, 
having horns, at least one hoof, a tail, a shaggy 
body, and a visage both frightful and ridiculous. 
The Vice wore generally, if not always, the cos- 
tume of the domestic fool or jester of the period, 
which is now worn by the clown of the circus. 
He was at first called the Vice ; but as the Vice 
became a distinct line of character, as much as 
walking gentleman on our stage, or ptre noble on 
the French, his name and his functions were 
afterward those of Infidelity, Hypocrisy, Desire, 
and so forth. Sometimes the part of a gallant or 
a bully was written for the Vice, and was named 
accordingly ; and sometimes he was called Iniqui- 
ty. When he bore this name, he would seem to 
have been not a mere buffoon or clown, making 
merriment with gibes and antics, but a senten- 
tious person with all his fun ; for Shakespeare 
makes the following descriptive mention of this 
kind of Vice : 

"Thus, like \\\q. formal N'\c&, Iniquity, 
I moralize two meanings in one word." 

Richard the Third, Act III, Sc. I. 

But the Vice generally performed the mingled 
functions of scamp, braggart, and practical joker. 

* The reader who cares to see them may find them stated and 
confiited in Douce's Illustrations of Shakespeare^ VoL I. p. 466. 
16* X 



370 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



There was a conventional make-up for his face. 
Barnaby Rich, in his Adventitres of Britsamis, 
published 1592, says that a certain personage had 
" his beard cut peecke a devant, turnde uppe a lit- 
tle, like the Vice of a playe." He was armed 
with a dagger or sword of lath, with which he 
beat the Devil, — that personage having his re- 
venge, almost invariably, at the end of the play, by 
taking his tormentor upon his back and running 
off with him into "hell-mought." There has been 
a notable and mysterious moral significance dis- 
covered in this beating of the Devil by the Vice, 
of the master by the servant. I cannot see it. It 
seems plainly that the object of the performance 
was merely to make coarse fun for coarse peo- 
ple ; the contrivers, to be sure, not lacking wit so 
utterly as to fail to make both the temporary 
annoyance and the final retribution fall upon the 
supremely bad personages. 

In one of the Clown's songs in Twelfth Nighty 
Shakespeare describes in a few words the func- 
tion of the Vice, his quickness of movement, his 
weapon, and his tormenting of the Devil. 

" I am gone, sir, 

And anon, sir, 
I '11 be with you again, 

In a trice, 

Like to the old Vice, 
Your need to sustain ; 

" Who with dagger of lath 
In his rage and his wrath 
Cries, Aha ! to the Devil." 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



371 



Moral-plays were at first performed upon the 
pageants or scaffolds from which they were driv- 
ing the miracle-plays. But at last it was thought 
that people might better go to the play than have 
the play go to them ; and it was found that barns 
and great halls were more convenient for both 
actors and audience than movable scaffolds. Yet 
later, people discovered that best of all avail- 
able places were inn-yards, where windows and 
galleries and verandas commanded a view of a 
court round which the house was built. Some- 
times moral-plays were written to be played in the 
interval between a feast or dinner and a banquet ; 
the banquet having corresponded to what we call 
the dessert, and having been usually served in 
another room. Hence the name of "Interlude," 
which was frequently given to these plays. Yet 
the name "Interlude" came to be almost con- 
fined to a kind of play shorter than a moral-play, 
and without allegorical characters or significance, 
and so better suited to the occasion for which it 
was intended. John Hey wood was the master of 
this kind of play-writing, if, indeed, he were not 
its inventor ; but his proper place is at a later 
period of our little history. 

The oldest English moral-play yet discovered 
exists in manuscript, and is entitled The Castle of 
Perseverance^ It was written about 1450. The 

* Once in possession of Dr. Cox Macro ; it passed into the col- 
lection of Mr. Hudson Gurney, who submitted it to Mr. Collier. 
See that gentleman's Annals of the Stage, &c., Vol. II. p. 278. 



372 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



principal character is Humanum Genus, an em- 
bodiment of mankind, whose moral enemies, the 
World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Mundus, Caro, 
and Belial), open the play by a conference, in 
which they boast of their powers.* Mankind (Hu- 
manum Genus) then appears, and announces that 
he has just come into the world naked, and imme- 
diately a good and a bad angel present themselves, 
and assert their claims to his confidence. He 
gives himself up to the latter, who through the 
agency of the World places him in the hands of 
Voluptuousness and Folly (Voluptas and Stulti- 
tia ; but let it suffice to say that all the charac- 

* This triad was a great favorite with the authors of moral- 
plays. There is extant a unique copy of a French moral-play 
with the following title : " Moralite nouvelle, de Mundus : Caro : 
Demonia. En laquelle verrez les durs assautz et tentations quilz 
font au Chevalier Chrestien : Et comme par conseil de son bon 
esprit, avec la grace de Dieu, les vaincra, et a la fin aura le Roy- 
aume de paradis. Et est a cinq personnages. Cest a savoir. Le 
chavalier chrestien, Lesprit, La chair, Le monde, et le Dyable." 
Notwithstanding the assaults mentioned in its title, this moral- 
play has none of the life and action of the English play upon 
the same subject. It is a dull talk between the five person- 
ages, in which Lesprit rarely speaks without quoting Saint Paul 
with great particularity. The French miracle-plays and moral- 
plays are always much more "talky" than ours. So early ap- 
peared that difference between the dramatic taste of the two 
peoples, — the one inclining to action, the other to speech. The 
single existing ancient copy of this moral-play (which is accom- 
panied by a farce, Les deux savetiers) is printed in Gothic letter, 
and evidently came from the press in the early part of the six- 
teenth century. Like others of the printed plays of that period, 
it is in a very singular form, the page being in height about four 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 273 

ters have Latin names). Backbiter then makes 
him acquainted with Avarice and the other dead- 
ly sins, of whom Luxury — in these plays always 
a woman — becomes his leman. The good angel 
sends Confession to him, who is told that he is 
come too soon, he having then more agreeable 
matters in hand than the confessing of sin. But 
at last, by the help of Penitence, Mankind is re- 
claimed, and got off into the strong Castle of Per- 
severance, in company with the Seven Cardinal 
Virtues. Belial and the Deadly Sins lay siege to 
the castle ; the leader having first berated and 
beaten his forces for having allowed his prey to 
escape him.* Belial and the Sins are defeated, 

times its width. This form was adopted as most convenient for 
the play-lovers of that day to carry to the theatre. Ninety fac- 
simile copies of this singular and interesting play-book, and also 
of La Ve7iditio7i de Joseph and Les Blaspheinateiirs de Dieti, which 
were originally printed in the same form, at about the same time, 
and of each of which but a single ancient copy exists, were 
printed at the expense of the Prince d'Essling. 

* Belial thus incites his followers to the assault : — 

" I here trumpys trebelen all of tene : 
The wery world walkyth to werre .... 
Sprede my penon upon a prene 
And stryke we for the now undyr sterre. 
Schapyth now your sheldys shene 
Yone skallyd skouts for to skerre .... 
Buske ye now, boys, belyve. 
For ever I stond in mekyl stryve 
Whyl Mankind is clene lyve." 

Mr. Collier, from whom I copy them, justly remarks upon a 
certain degree of life and spirit in these rude lines. 



374 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



chiefly by the aid of Charity and Patience, who 
pelt them with roses from the battlements. But 
Mankind begins to grow old ; and Avarice under- 
mines the castle, and persuades him to leave it. 
Garcio (a boy) claims all the goods which Mankind 
has gathered with the aid of Avarice, when Death 
and the Soul appear ; and the latter calls on Pity 
for help. But the bad angel takes the hero on 
his back and sets off with him hellward. The 
scene changes to heaven, where Pity, Peace, Jus- 
tice, and Truth plead for him with God, and we 
are left to infer that Man is saved. God speaks 
the moralizing epilogue. A rude drawing on the 
last leaf of the manuscript shows the Castle with 
a bed beneath it for Humanum Genus, and five 
scaffolds for God, Belial, the World, the Flesh, 
and Avarice. 

Mr. Collier is of opinion that so carefully con- 
structed and varied an allegory "must have had 
predecessors in the same kind " ; but this sup- 
position seems to me by no means necessary. 
An allegorical purpose once formed, the mira- 
cle-plays furnished all the necessary precedents 
for the development of the idea. In another 
play in the same collection, called Mind, Willy 
and Understanding, Anima, the soul, also ap- 
pears, and, having been debauched by the three 
personages who give the play its name, she " ap- 
perythe in most horribul wyse, fowlere than a 
fend," and gives birth to six of the deadly sins 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



375 



according to this direction : " Here rennyt out 
from undyr the horrybull mantyll of the Soule six 
small boys in the lyknes of devyllys, and so re- 
torne ageyn." Conscious of her degradation, she 
goes out with her three seducers, and it is di- 
rected that "in the going the Soule syngyth in 
the most lamentabuU wyse, with drawte notes, as 
yt ys songyn in the passyon wyke." In the end, 
Mind, Will, and Understanding are converted 
from their evil ways, to the great joy of Anima. 

John Skelton, poet laureate to Henry VH. and 
his son, wrote two moral plays. The Necromajicer 
and Magnificence. A copy of the latter still ex- 
ists ; and one of the former was seen and de- 
scribed by Collins, although it has since been lost. 
The characters are a Necromancer, the Devil, a 
Notary, Simony, and Avarice ; and the action is 
merely the trial of the last two before the Devil. 
The Necromancer calls up the Devil and opens 
the court. The prisoners are found guilty, and 
are sent straightway to hell. The Devil abuses 
the Conjurer for rousing him too early; but in 
the end they have a dance together in hell, at 
the end of which Sathanas trips up the Conjurer 
and disappears in flame and smoke. This play, 
which was played before King Henry VH. at 
Woodstock on Palm Sunday, was printed in 
1504. When Magnificence was produced we do 
not know, as its title-page is without date ; but 
Skelton mentions it in a poem printed in 1523. 



376 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



Its purpose is to show the vanity of Magnificence. 
The hero, Magnificence, eaten out of house and 
home by a rabble of friends called Fancy alias Lar- 
gess, Counterfeit-countenance, Crafty-conveyance, 
Cloked-collusion, Courtly-abusion, and Folly, falls 
into the hands of Adversity and Poverty ; and 
finally is taken possession of by Despair and Mis- 
chief, who persuade him to commit suicide, which 
he is about to do, when Good-hope stays his hand, 
and Redress, Circumspection, and Perseverance 
sober him down to a humble frame of mind. The 
piece is intolerably long, and much of it is writ- 
ten in that wearisome verse called Skeltonic* 
To relieve it, some fun is introduced, which is of 
the coarsest kind, but which was probably more 
to the taste of all the poet's audience, high and 
low, than his heavy moralizing.! 

* Of which the following passage is an example : — 

" For counterfet countenaunce knowen am I : 
This worlde is full of my foly. 
I set not by hym a fly 
That cannot counterfet a lye, 
Swere and stare and byde thereby, 
And countenaunce it clenly, 
And defende it manerly. 
A knave will counterfet now a knyght, 
A lurdayne lyke a lorde to fyght, 
A mynstrell lyke a man of myght, 
A tappyster lyke a lady bryght. 
Thus make I them wyth thryft to fyght ; 
Thus at the last I brynge hym ryght 
To tyburne, where they hange on hyght." 

t As, for instance, the following passage quoted by Mr. Collier, 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. -^^j 

Of pure moral-plays the reader has probably- 
had quite enough ; but two others may well be 
noticed, on account of traits peculiar to them. In 
one, called The Loiiger thou Livest the more Foole 
thou art, the chief character is Moros, a mischiev- 
ous fool, who enters upon this direction : " Here 
entreth Moros, counterfaiting a vaine gesture and 
a foolish countenance, synging the foote of many 
songes, as fools were wont." This brings to mind 
Shakespeare's fools and clowns, who are always 
singing the foot of many songs ; and we see that 
the making them do so was no device of his, but a 
mere faithful copying of the living models before 
him ; though the lyric sweetness and the wit and 
the wisdom which he puts into their mouths were 
in most instances, we may be sure, his own. The 
other moral-play in question. The Marriage of 
Wit and Science,* is remarkable, not only for its 
very elaborate and ingenious, though equally dull 

in which Folly wins a wager that he will laugh Crafty-convey- 
ance out of his coat. 

" \Here foly niaketh semblaunt to take a lowse from crafty convey^ 
aunce shoulder. "[ 
Fancy. "What hast thou found there ? 
Foly. By god, a lowse. 

Crafty-convey . By cockes harte, I trow thou lyste. 
Foly. By the masse, a spanyshe moght with a gray lyste. 
Fancy. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha ! 

\Here crafty convatince putteth of his gowne, 
Foly. Put on thy gowne agayne, for now thou hast lost. 
Fancy. Lo, John a bonam, where is thy brayne .'' " 

* Reprinted by the Shakespeare Society. 



378 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



and wearisome allegory, but for the fact that it is 
regularly divided into acts and scenes, which is 
not the case with even many of the early comedies 
and tragedies by which the miracle-plays were 
succeeded. One of the very latest of the moral- 
plays was The Three Lords ajid TJiree Ladies of 
London, which was written after 1588, and printed 
in 1590. But, as its title would indicate, this is in 
reality a kind of comedy ; and it is also remarka- 
ble as being written for the most part in blank- 
verse. 

III. 

As allegory had crept into the miracle-plays, 
and, by introducing the impersonation of abstract 
qualities, had gradually worked changes in their 
structure and their purpose which finally pro- 
duced the moral-play, so personages intended as 
satires upon classes and individuals, and as rep- 
resentations of the manners and customs of the 
day, year after year took more and more the place 
of the cold and stiff abstractions which filled the 
stage in the pure moral-play, until at last Comedy, 
or the ideal representation of human life, appeared 
in English drama. Thus in Tom Tyler and his 
Wife, which, according to Ritson, was published 
in 1578, and which contains internal evidence that 
it was written about eight years before that date, 
the personages are Tom Tyler, his good woman, 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



379 



who is a gray mare of the most formidable kind, 
Tom Tailor, his friend. Desire, Strife, Sturdy, 
Tipple, Patience, and the Vice. In The Conflict 
of Conscience^ written at about the same date, 
among Conscience, Hypocrisy, Tyranny, Avarice, 
Sensual-suggestion, and the like, appear four his- 
torical personages, Francis Spiera, an Italian law- 
yer, who is called Philologus, his two sons, and 
Cardinal Eusebius. Mr. Collier also mentions a 
political moral-play, written about 1565, called Al- 
bion Knight, in which the hero, a knight named 
Albion, is a personification of England, and the 
motive of which is satire upon the oppression of 
the commons by the nobles. But before this 
date, and probably in the reign of Edward VI., 
Bishop Bale had written his Kynge yohari, a play 
the purpose of which was to further the Reforma- 
tion, and which partook of the characters of a 
moral-play and a dramatic chronicle-history.* In- 
deed, neither the reformers nor their opponents 
were slow to take advantage of the stage as a 
means of indoctrinating the people with their pe- 
culiar views ; and as the government passed alter- 
nately into the hands of Papists and Protestants, 
plays were suppressed, or dramatic performances 
interdicted altogether, as the good of the ecclesi- 
astical party in power seemed to require.f In the 

* See the Introduction to King John, Vol. VI, p. 10 of the 
author's edition of Shakespeare's Works. 

t The curious reader will find in Hawkins's Origin of the Eng- 



380 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



very first year of Queen Mary's reign, 1553, a po- 
litico-religious moral-play, called Respublica, was 
produced, the purpose of which was to check the 
Reformation. The kingdom of England is imper- 
sonated as Respublica ; and, by the author's own 
admission. Queen Mary herself figures as Nemesis, 
the goddess of redress and correction.* 

John Heywood, whose interludes have been 
already mentioned, produced his first play before 
the year 1 5 2 1 ; yet, in turning our eyes back two 
generations to glance at his compositions, we may 
obtain perhaps a more correct view of the manner 
in which the English drama was developed, than 
if we had examined them in the order of time. 
Heywood was attached to the court of Henry VHI. 
as a singer and player upon the virginals. His 
interludes were short pieces, about the length of 
one act of a modern comedy. Humorous in their 

lish Drama a reprint of Lusty yuventus, which was written in the 
reign of Edward VI., and which is sufficiently thoroughgoing in 
its denunciation of the corruptions of the Church of Rome to 
satisfy the straitest Puritan. The personages quote Scripture, 
and in the midst of their speeches give chapter and verse with a 
merciless particularity which rivals that of Mause Headrigg. 
One of them is actually named God's Merciful Promises, May 
not the extraordinary names sometimes given by the Puritans to 
their children, rising from Thankful and Submit to Fight-the- 
good-fight-of-faith and Through-much-tribulation-thou-shalt-en- 
ter-into-the-kingdom-of-Heaven (called " for short " Trib), have 
been at first taken from favorite characters in moral-plays, writ- 
ten in support of the Reformation ? 

* Described in Collier's edition of Shakespeare's Works, 1843, 
Vol. I. p. xviii. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



381 



motive, and dependent for all their interest upon 
extravagant burlesque of every-day life, upon the 
broadest jokes and the coarsest satire, they were 
indeed but a kind of farce. That which is re- 
garded as Heywood's earliest extant production 
is entitled A Mery Play betwene the Pardoner aiid 
the Frere, the Curate, and Neyboitr Pratte. The 
Pardoner and the Friar have got leave of the Cu- 
rate to use his church, the former to show his 
relics, the latter to preach ; both having the same 
end in view, — money. They quarrel as to who 
shall have precedence, and at last fight. The Cu- 
rate, brought in by this row between his clerical 
brethren, attempts to separate and pacify them ; 
but failing to accomplish this single-handed, he 
calls Neighbor Pratt to his aid. In vain, however ; 
for the Pardoner and the Friar, like man and wife 
interrupted in a quarrel, unite their forces and 
beat the interlopers soundly. After which they 
depart, and the play ends. In The Four P's, 
another of Heywood's interludes, the personages 
are the Palmer, the Pardoner, the Poticary, and 
the Pedler. In this play there is little action ; 
and the four worthies, after gibing at each other's 
professions for a while, set out to see which can 
tell the biggest lie. After much elaborate and 
ingenious falsehood, the Palmer beats by the sim- 
ple assertion that he never saw a woman out of 
patience in his life ; at which his opponents " come 
down " without another word. The satire in these 



382 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

plays is found in the inconsistency between the 
characters of the personages and their profes- 
sions, and particularly in the absurd and ridic- 
ulous pretensions of the clergymen as to their 
priestly functions and the nature of their relics. 
In The Pardoner and the Friar, the Pardoner pro- 
duces " the great too of the holy trynyte," and 

" of our Ladye a relyke full good, 
Her bongrace, which she ware with her French hode 
Whan she wente oute al wayes for sonne bornynge " ; 

also, "Of all helowes the blessed jaw-bone"; and 
in The Four P's, there is "a buttocke-bone of 
Pentecoste." And yet Heywood was a stanch 
Romanist. 

Another of Heywood's interludes, yohan, Tyb, 
and Sir Jhan, is equally severe upon the clergy 
of his day. Johan pretends to be master of his 
own house, and, in Tyb's absence, threatens to 
beat her when she comes home. She returns and 
overhears him ; calls him to account, and he backs 
out. She brings home a pie and orders Johan to 
go and invite Sir Jhan, the priest, to eat it in their 
company. He believes all is not right between 
the priest and Tyb, but he is obliged to obey. 
The priest comes, and Johan is sent out to get 
water. While he is gone, it becomes plain that Sir 
Jhan and Tyb understand each other. He returns 
without water, the pail having leaked ; and while 
he is mending it with wax, the precious pair eat 
up the pie in spite of his complaints. At last he 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



383 



dashes down the pail in a rage, when they fall 
upon him and beat him till the blood runs, and 
go out together. He assumes the airs of a victor, 
until it occurs to him that they have gone "to 
make hym a cokwolde," which catastrophe he 
rushes out to prevent, and the curtain falls. 

There are certain passages in Heywood's plays, 
which, considering the period at which he wrote, 
are remarkable for genuine humor and descrip- 
tive power, as well as for spirited and lively versi- 
fication ; * and coarse and indecent as his produc- 

* See the following description of an alleged visit to hell by 
the Pardoner, in The Four P''s : — 

" Thys devyll and I walket arme in arme, 
So farre, tyll he had brought me thyther, 
Where all the devylls of hell togyther 
Stode in a ray, in suche apparell 
As for that day there metely fell. 
Theyr homes well gylt, theyr clowes full clene, 
Theyr taylles well kempt, and as I wene, 
With sothery butter theyr bodyes anoynted ; 
I never sawe devylls so well appoynted. 
The mayster devyll sat in his jacket, 
And all the soules were playinge at racket. 
None other rackettes they hadde in hande, 
Save every soule a good fyre brand ; 
Wherewith they played so pretely, 
That Lucyfer laughed merely ; 
And all the resedew of the feinds, 
Did laugh thereat ful wel like freends. 
But of my frende I sawe no whyt, 
Nor durst not axe for her as yet. 
Anone all this rout was brought in silens, 
And I by an usher brougt in presens 



384 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



tions must be pronounced, they exhibit more real 
dramatic power than appears in those of any other 
playwright of the first half of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. 

Heywood founded no school, seems to have had 
no imitators : there is no line of succession be- 
tween him and the man who must be regarded 
as the first writer of genuine English comedy. 
We have seen that plays in which characters 
drawn from real life mingled with the allegorical 
personages proper to moral-plays were written as 
late as 1570. Such were Tom Tyler and his Wife 
and The Conflict of Conscience, mentioned above. 

Of Lucyfer : the lowe, as wel I could, 
I knelyd, whiche he so well alowde, 
That thus he beckte, and by saynt Antony 
He smyled on me well favouredly, 
Bendynge his browes as brode as barne durres, 
Shakynge hys eares as ruged as burres ; 
Rolynge his eyes as rounde as two bushels ; 
Flastynge the fyre out of his nosetryls ; 
Gnashinge hys teeth so vaynglorously, 
That me thought tyme to fall to fiatery, 
Wherewith I tolde, as I shall tell. 

plesant pycture ! O prince of hell ! 
Feutred in fashyon abominable, 

And syns that is inestimable 
For me to prayse, the worthyly, 

1 leve of prayse, as unworthy 

To geve the prays, besechynge the 
To heare my sewte, and then to be 
So good to graunt the thynge I crave." 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



385 



But as early as the year 155 1, Nicolas Udall, who 
became Master of Eton and afterward of West- 
minster, had written a play divided into acts and 
scenes, with a gradually developed action tending 
to a climax, and the characters of which were all 
ideal representatives of actual life ; a play which 
was, in short, a comedy. The play is named, after 
its hero, Ralph Roister Doister. The scene is laid 
in London ; and Ralph, who is a conceited, rattle- 
pated young fellow about town, and amorous with- 
al, fancies himself in love with Dame Custance, a 
gay young widow with " a tocher," as he thinks, 
of a thousand pounds and more. But upon this 
point Matthew Merrygreek,* his poor kinsman 
and attendant, a shrewd, mischievous, timeserving 
fellow, remarks to him, that 

" An hundred pounde of marriage-money doubtlesse, 
Is ever thirtie pounde sterlyng, or somewhat less ; 
So that her thousande pounde, yf she be thriftie 
Is much neere about two hundred and fiftie. 
Howbeit, wowers and widowes are never poore." 

Which shows that our ways, in this respect at 
least, have not changed much from those of our 
forefathers three hundred years ago. When the 
play opens, Custance is betrothed to Garvin Good- 
luck, a merchant who is then at sea. But Merry- 
greek crams his master with eagerly swallowed 

* " Merry-Greek " was slang, three hundred years ago, for what 
we now call a jolly fellow. " Then she 's a merry Greek indeed." 
Troilus and Cressida, Act I. Sc. 2. 

17 Y 



386 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



flattery, and puts him in heart by telling him 
that a man of his person and spirit can win any 
woman. Ralph encounters three of Custance's 
handmaids, old and young ; and by flattering 
words and caresses tries to bring them over to 
his side. He leaves a letter with one of them for 
Custance, which is delivered, but not immedi- 
ately opened. The next day Dobinet Doughty, 
the merchant's servant, brings a ring and token 
from Master Goodluck to Dame Custance ; but 
Madge, having got a scolding for her pains in de- 
livering Ralph's letter, refuses to carry the ring 
and token. Other servants entering, Dobinet in- 
troduces himself as a messenger from the Dame's 
betrothed husband ; and they, especially one Ti- 
bet Talkapace, being delighted at the idea of a 
wedding, and mistaking the man who is thus to 
bless the household, fall out as to who is to deliver 
Ralph's presents. But Tib triumphs by snatch- 
ing the souvenirs and running out with them to 
her mistress. A reproof to Tib, in her turn, ends 
the second act. The third opens with a visit by 
Merrygreek to Dame Custance, that he may find 
out if the ring and token have worked well for 
his master's interest. But he only learns from 
Dame Custance that she is fast betrothed to Good- 
luck ; that she has not even opened Ralph's letter, 
but knows that it must be from him, — 

" For no man there is but a very dolte and lout 
That to wowe a widowe would so go about." 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



387 



She adds, that Ralph shall never have her for his 
wife while he lives. On receiving this news, 
Ralph declares that he shall then and there in- 
continently die ; when Merrygreek takes him at 
his word, pretends to think that he is really dying, 
and calls in a priest and four assistants to sing a 
mock requiem. Ralph, however, like most disap- 
pointed lovers, concludes to live ; and Merrygreek 
advises him to serenade Custance and boldly ask 
her hand. So done ; but Custance snubs him, 
and produces his yet unread letter ; which Merry- 
greek reads to the assembled company, with such 
defiance of the punctuation that the sense is per- 
verted, and all are moved to mirth, except Ralph, 
who in wrath disowns the composition. Dame 
Custance retires ; and Merrygreek, again flattering 
his master, advises him to refrain himself awhile 
from his lady-love, and that then she will seek 
him ; for as to women, 

'* When ye will, they will not ; will not ye, then will they." 

Ralph threatens vengeance upon the scrivener 
who copied his letter ; but when the penman 
reads it with the proper pauses, he finds out who 
is the real culprit ; and thus the third act ends. 

The fourth opens with the entrance of another 
messenger from Goodluck to Dame Custance. 
While he is talking to the lady, Ralph enters, 
ostentatiously giving orders about making ready 
his armor, takes great airs, calls Custance his 
spouse, and tells the messenger to tell his master 



388 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



that "his betters be in place now." The angered 
Dame summons maid and man, and turns Ralph 
and Merrygreek out of doors ; but the latter soon 
slips back and tells her that his only purpose is to 
make sport of Ralph, who is about returning 
armed "to pitch a field" with his female foes. 
Roister Bolster soon enters, armed with pot, pan, 
and popgun, and accompanied by three or four 
assistants. But the comely Dame, who seems to 
be a tall woman of her hands, stands her ground, 
and, aided by her maids, "pitches into" the enemy, 
and with mop and besom puts him to ignominious 
flight ; in which squabble the knave Merrygreek, 
pretending to fight for his rich kinsman, manages 
to belabor him soundly. At the beginning of the 
fifth act Garvin Goodluck makes his appearance, 
and Sim Suresby tells him of what he saw and 
heard at his visit to Dame Custance. Goodluck 
is convinced of the lady's fickleness. She arrives, 
and would welcome him tenderly ; but of course 
there is trouble. Finally, however, on the evi- 
dence of Tristram Trusty, she is freed from sus- 
picion ; and Ralph, petitioning for pardon, is in- 
vited to the wedding supper, and the play is at an 
end. It is rather a rude performance, but it con- 
tains all the elements of a regular comedy of the 
romantic school ; and it must be confessed that 
many a duller one has been presented to a mod- 
ern audience.* 

* The following extract from the opening of the third scene 
of Act IV. of this comedy is a fair example of its style : — 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



389 



Yet ruder and coarser than Ralph Roister Dois- 
ter, and less amusing, is Gammer Gtirtons Needle, 
which until 18 18 was supposed to be the earliest 
extant English comedy ; but which was not writ- 
ten until about thirty years later than Udall's 
play, it having been first performed, as Malone 
reasonably concludes, at Christ College, Cam- 
bridge, in 1566. Its author was John Still, after- 
ward Bishop of Bath and Wells, who was born in 

" C. Ciistance. What meane these lewde felowes thus to trouble 

me still ? 
Sym. Suresby here, perchaunce, shal thereof deme som yll, 
And shall suspect me in some point of naughtinesse. 
And they come hitherward. 
Sym. Suresby. What is their businesse ? 
Ctist. I have nought to them, nor they to me, in sadnesse. 
Sure. Let us hearken them ; somewhat there is, I feare it. 
Ralph Royster. I wil speake out aloude best, that she may 

heare it, 
Merrygreek. Nay, alas ! ye may so feare hir out of hir wit. 
Royster. Nay by the crosse of my sworde, I will hurt hir no whit. 
Merry. Will ye doe noe harme in deede ? Shall I trust your 

worde ? 
Royster. By Roister Doister's fayth, I will speak but in borde. 
Sure. Let us hearken them : somewhat there is, I feare it. 
Royster. I will speake out aloude, I care not who heare it. — 
Sirs, see that my harnesse, my tergat, and my shield, 
Be made as bright now as when I was last in fielde, 
As white as I shoulde to warre againe to morrowe : 
For sicke shall I be but I worke some folke sorrowe. 
Therefore see that all shine as bright as sainct George, 
Or as doth a key newly come from the smith's forge. 
I woulde have my sworde and harnesse to shine so bright 
That I might ther with dimme mine enemies' sight : 
I would have it cast beames as fast, I tell you playne, 



390 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



1543. The personages in this play are all, with 
two or three exceptions, rustics, and their lan- 
guage is a broad provincial dialect. The plot 
turns upon the simple incident of Gammer Gur- 
ton's loss of her needle while she is mending her 
servant Hodge's breeches. Sharp is the hunt 
through five acts after this needful instrument ; 
Hodge even pretending to have an interview with 
the Devil upon the subject. But the needle is 

As doth the glittryng grass after a showre of raine. 

And see that, in case I should have to come to armyng, 

All things may be ready at a minute's warning. 

For such a chaunce may chaunce in an houre, do ye heare ? 

Merry. As perchaunce shall not chaunce againe in seven 

yeare. 
Royster. Now draw we neare to hir, and heare what shal be 

sayde. 
Merry. But I woulde not have you make hir too much afrayde. 
Royster. Well founde, sweete wife (I trust) for al this your 

soure looke. 
Cust. Wife ! Why cal ye me wife ? 

Sure. Wife ! this gear goeth acrook. 

Merry. Nay Mistresse Custance, I warrant you our letter 
Is not as we redde e'en nowe, but much better ; 
And where ye half stomaked this gentleman afore, 
For this same letter ye wyll love hym nowe therefore ; 
Nor it is not this letter though ye were a queene 
That shoulde breake marriage betweene you twaine, I weene. 
Cust. I did not refuse hym for the letter's sake. 
Royster. Then ye are content me for your husbande to take. 
Cust. You for my husbande to take ! Nothing lesse, truely. 
Royster. Yea, say so sweete spouse, afore strangers hardly. 
Merry. And though I have here his letter of love with me, 
Yet his rings and his tokens he sent keepe safe with ye. 
Cust. A mischief take his tokens, and him and thee too." 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



391 



not found until Hodge, having on the mended 
garment, is hit " a good blow on the buttocks " by 
the bailiff, whose services have been called in ; 
when the Clown discovers that Gammer Gurton's 
needle, like Old Rapid's in the Road to Rtduy 
does not always stick in the right place. The 
second act of this farrago of practical jokes and 
coarse humor opens with that jolly old drinking- 
song, beginning, 

" I cannot eat but little meat, 
My stomach is not good," 

which may be found in many collections of lyric 
verse. 

IV. 

Whether it was that moral-plays satisfied for a 
long time our forefathers' desire for serious enter- 
tainment, and furnished them sufficient occasion 
for that reflection upon the graver interests and 
incidents of human life which it is tragedy's chief 
function to suggest, or whether the public, wearied 
by the sententious gravity of the moral -plays, 
(which, however, their authors had often sought 
to reheve by humorous character and incident,) 
demanded, on the introduction of real life into 
the drama, that only its light and merry side 
should be presented, it is certain that Comedy en- 
tered upon the English stage much in advance of 
her elder sister. It is barely possible that a play 



392 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



upon the story of Romeo and Juliet was performed 
in London before the year 1562 ;* but the earliest 
tragedy extant in our language is Feri'ex aiid Por^ 
reXy or Gorboduc, all of which was probably writ- 
ten by Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, but to 
the first three acts of which Thomas Norton has 
a disputed claim. This play is founded on events 
in the fabulous chronicles of Britain. The prin- 
cipal personages are Gorboduc, King of Britain 
about B. C. 600, Videna, his wife, and Ferrex and 
Porrex, his sons. But nobles, counsellors, para- 
sites, a lady, and messengers make the personages 
number thirteen. The first act is occupied with 
the division of the kingdom by Gorboduc to his 
sons, and the talk thereupon. The second, to the 
fomenting of a quarrel between the brothers for 
complete sovereignty. The third, to the events 
of a civil war, in which Porrex kills Ferrex. In 
the fourth, the Queen, who most loved Ferrex, 
kills Porrex while he is asleep at night in his 
chamber ; and the people rise in wrath and 
avenge this murder by the death of both Videna 
and Gorboduc. The fifth act is occupied by a 
bloody suppression of this rebellion by the nobles, 
who in their turn fall into dissension ; and the 
land, without a rightful king and rent by civil 
strife, becomes desolate. This tragedy was writ- 
ten for one of the Christmas festivals of the Inner 

* See the Introduction to Romeo and Juliet, in the author's 
edition of Shakespeare's Works. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



393 



Temple, to be played by the gentlemen of that 
society ; and by desire of Queen Elizabeth it was 
performed by them at Whitehall on the i8th of 
January, 1561. It is plain that the author of this 
play meant to be very elegant, decorous, and clas- 
sical ; and he succeeded. Of all the stirring 
events upon which the tragedy is built, not one is 
represented ; all are told. Even Ferrex and Por- 
rex are not brought together on the stage, and 
Videna does not meet either of them before the 
audience after the first act. Each act is intro- 
duced by a dumb show, intended to be symbolical 
of what will follow, — a common (ievice on our 
early stage, which was ridiculed by Shakespeare 
in the third act of Hamlet ; * and each act, ex- 
cept the last, is followed by a moralizing and 

* " The Order and Signification of the Domme Shew before the 

fourth Act. 

" First the musick of howeboies began to playe, during which 
there came from mider the stage as though out of hell, three fu- 
ries, Alecto, Megera, and Ctisiphone, clad in blacke garmentes 
sprinkled with bloud and flames, their bodies girt with snakes, 
their heds spred with serpentes in stead of heire, the one bearing 
in her hand a snake, the other a whip, and the third a burning 
firebrand ; ech driving before them a king and a queene, which 
moved by furies unnaturally had slaine their owne children. The 
names of the kings and queenes were these, Tantalus, Medea, 
Athamas, Ino, Cambises, Althea ; after that the furies and these 
had passed about the stage thrise, they departed and than the 
musick ceased : hereby was signified the unnaturall murders to 
follow, that is to say Porrex slaine by his owne mother ; and of 
King Gorboduc and Queen Videna, killed by their owne sub- 
jects." 

17* 



294 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

explanatory chorus recited by "four ancient and 
sage men of Britain." 

Ferrex mid Porj'ex is remarkable as being the 
first English play extant in blank verse ; and prob- 
ably it was the first so written. It is to be won- 
dered at that, even in this respect, it was ever 
taken as a model. For although Sir Philip Sidney 
in his Defence of Poesie, finding fault with Ferrex 
and Porrex for its violation of the unities of time 
and place, admits that it is " full of stately speeches 
and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height 
of Seneca his stile, and full of notable morality, 
which it doth most deUghtfully teach," yet it may 
be safely said that another play so lifeless in move- 
ment, so commonplace in thought, so utterly un- 
dramatic in motive, so oppressively didactic in lan- 
guage, so absolutely without distinction of char- 
acter among its personages, cannot be found in 
our dramatic literature. From Ferrex and Porrex 
we turn even to the miracle-plays and moral-plays 
with relief, if not with pleasure. Some notion of 
its tediousness may be gathered from the fact, that 
it closes with a speech one hundred lines in length, 
and that the first act is chiefly occupied with 
three speeches by three counsellors, which to- 
gether make two hundred and sixty verses.* 

* Of its style, the following passage, in which its most excit- 
ing incident, the murder of Porrex, is announced, is a favorable 
specimen. 

" Marcella. O where is ruth, or where is pitie now .-* 

"Whether is gentle hart and mercy fled } 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



395 



This play demands notice because it is our first 
tragedy, our first play written in blank verse, but 

Are they exil'd out of our stony brestes, 

Never to make returne ? is all the world 

Drowned in bloud, and soncke in crueltie ? 

If not in women mercy may be found, 

If not (alas) within the mother's brest 

To her owne childe, to her owne flesh and bloud ; 

If ruthe be banished thence, if pitie there 

May have no place, if there no gentle hart 

Do live and dwell, where should we seeke it then ? 

" Gorboduc. Madame (alas), what meanes your wofull tale ? 

" Marcella. O silly woman I ! why to this houre 
Have kinde and fortune thus deferred my breath, 
That I should live to see this dolefull day ? 
Will ever wight beleve that such hard hart 
Could rest within the cruell mother's brest, 
With her owne hand to slaye her onely sonne ? 
But out (alas) these eyes behelde the same. 
They saw the driery sight, and are become 
Most ruthefull recordes of the bloody fact. 
Porrex (alas) is by his mother slaine. 
And with her hand a wofull thing to tell ; 
While slumbring on his carefull he restes. 
His hart stabde in with knife is reft of life. 

" Gorboduc. O Eubulus, oh draw this sword of ours 
And pearce this hart with speed ! O hatefull light, 
O loathsome life, O sweete and welcome death, 
Deare Eubulus, worke this we thee besech ! 

" Eiibnhis. Pacient your grace, perhappes he liveth yet. 
With wound receaved but not of certaine death. 

" Gorboduc. O let us then repayre unto the place 
And see if Porrex live, or thus be slaine. 

" Marcella. Alas, he liveth not it is to true. 
That with these eyes, of him a pereless prince, 
Sonne to a king, and in the flower of youth. 
Even with a twinkle a sensless stocke I saw." 



39^ 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



for no other reason. It had no perceptible effect 
upon, and marks no stage in, the progress of the 
English drama. In that regard it might as well 
have been written in Greece and in Greek, or 
in ancient British, by Gorboduc himself; for, in 
either case, its motive and plan could not have 
been more foreign to the genius of English dra- 
matic Hterature. And here it is proper to say, that 
translated plays, and plays adapted from Greek 
and Latin authors, of which there were many 
performed in the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign, 
are passed by without notice in this account, not 
merely because they were translations and adap- 
tations, but because, not being an outgrowth of 
the English character, they were entirely without 
influence upon the development of the English 
drama, in an account of which they therefore have 
no proper place. They were not seeds that took 
root ; but lifeless foreign bodies cast upon the 
ground, to bury themselves by their own weight, 
in the process of time, out of sight and out of 
memory. Nor do the translations and adaptations 
of Italian plays, of which not a few were made 
at about the same period, seem to have had any 
more vitality or assimilative power ; although 
one of them. The Supposes, translated from Ari- 
osto by George Gascoigne, and acted at Gray's 
Inn in 1566, must be mentioned as the earliest 
extant play in English prose. The fact is signifi- 
cant, indeed, that none of the many plays espe- 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



397 



cially written for the court, and for the learned 
societies and the elegant people of that day, have 
left any traces even of a temporary influence 
upon our stage. Our English drama, unlike that 
of France, had its germ in the instincts, and its 
growth with the growth, of the whole English 
people. 

It must be confessed that up to, and even past, 
the beginning of the Elizabethan era,* the plays 
which were produced to satisfy the taste of our 
forefathers were rude, gross, unsymmetrical, and 
heterogeneous ; and that their apparently discord- 
ant elements were rarely bound together by any 
stronger bond of unity than the mere scenic suc- 
cession of events. Of character there was little ; 
of keeping, no more ; probability was defied, de- 
corum violated. The individual traits of the per- 
sonages in a play were rather described by each 
other, or even by themselves, than developed ; 
and the feelings which the poet deemed proper 
to any dramatic situation were enumerated rather 
than expressed. The more cultivated people of 
that time saw all these defects, except the last ; 
and yet, as cultivated people often do, devised for 
them the wrong remedy.f Not seeing or not re- 

* The era which bears the name of Elizabeth, because the men 
who made it illustrious were her contemporaries, commenced 
after the beginning, and stretched beyond the end, of her reign. 
Its limits may be taken as 1575 - 1625. 

t George Whetstone, in the dedication of his Promos and Cos- 



398 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



garding the fact that our drama was a new and 
native growth, they judged it by a foreign stand- 
ard, and would have conformed it to an effete and 
foreign type. In this Enghsh drama, rude, coarse, 
and confused as it appears, there was yet a native, 
inherent vitality. Supported by the strong Eng- 
lish imagination, it could defy the unities of time 

Sandra, the incidents of which Shakespeare used in his Measure 
for Measure, and which wa.s published in 1578, gives us the fol- 
lowing criticism upon the English drama of that day : — 

"The Englishman in this quallitie is most vaine, indiscreete, 
and out of order : he first groundes his worke on impossibilities : 
then, in three howers, ronnes he throwe the worlde : marryes, ■ 
gets children, makes children men, men to conquer kingdomes, 
murder monsters, and bringeth Gods from Heaven, and fetcheth 
divils from Hel. And (that which is worst) their ground is not so 
unperfect as their workinge indiscreete ; not waying, so the peo- 
ple laugh, though they laugh them (for their follies) to scorn. 
Manye tymes, to make myrthe, they make a clowne companion 
with a Kinge : in theyr grave Councils they allow the advise of 
fools : yea, they use one order of speach for all persons, a grose 
Indecorum," &c. 

Sir Philip Sidney, in a passage of his Defence of Poesie, (writ- 
ten about 1583,) which has been often quoted, but which is too 
important to be omitted here, says : — 

" Our Tragedies and Comedies are not without cause cried out 
against, observing rules neither of honest civilitie nor skilfull Po- 
etrie. Excepting Gorboduck (againe I say of those that I have 
seene) which notwithstanding, as it is full of statelie speeches, and 
well sounding phrases, climing to the height of Seneca his stile, 
and as full of notable moralitie, which it doth most delightfully 
teach, and so obtaine the verie end of Poesie, yet in truth it is 
very defections in the circumstances, which grieves me, because 
it might not remaine as an exact modell of all Tragedies. For it 
is faulty in place and time, the two necessarie companions of all 
corporal! actions. For when the Stage should alway represent 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. ^qq 

and place ; but in obedience to the English love of 
moral truth, it struggled after that greater unity, 
the unity of dramatic interest. With a contempt 
of the conventional peculiarly English, it sought 
the presentation of an idealized picture of real 
life, which life is neither pure tragedy nor pure 
comedy, and in which mirth and sadness, kings 

but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it, should 
be, both by Aristotle's precept and common reason, but one day, 
there is both many dayes and manie places artificially imagined. 
But if it bee so in Gorboduck, how much more in all the rest, where 
you shall have Asia of the one side, and Affrick of the other, and 
so many other under-kingdoms, that the Player, when he comes 
in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will 
not be conceived. Now you shall have three ladies walke to 
gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a gar- 
den. By and by we hear newes of a shipvvrack in the same 
place ; then, we are to blame if we accept it not for a rocke. 
Upon the backe of that comes out a hideous monster with fire 
and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take 
it for a cave ; while, in the meantime, two armies flie in, repre- 
sented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard hart 
will not receive it for a pitched field ? Now, of time they are 
much more liberal ; for ordinarie it is that two young Princes fall 
in love : after many traverses she is got with child, delivered of 
a fair boy ; he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is ready 
to get another child, and all this in two houres' space : which 
how absurd it is in sense, even sense may imagine, and art hath 
taught, and all ancient examples justified, and at this daye the 

ordinarie players in Italic wil not erre in But besides these 

grosse absurdities how all their Playes be neither right Tragedies 
nor right Comedies, mingUng Kings and Clownes, not because 
the matter so carieth it, but thrust in the Clowne by head and 
shoulders, to play a part in Majestical matters with neither de- 
cencie nor discretion ; so as neither the admiration and commis- 
eration, nor right sportfulness is by their mongrell Tragi-comedy 
obtained." 



400 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

and 'downs, do mingle.* It clung to its confused 
collocation of heterogeneous materials, because it 
was striving to work them together into a natural 
symmetry, — a symmetry not austere, limited, and 
geometrical, like that of a Doric temple, in which 
one half is the exact counterpart of the other, and 
the details are the repetition of a single form, but 
large and free, yet true, like the symmetry of 
mountains and of trees, in which the masses are 
irregular and the details unlike, while yet there is 
perfect balance, and a harmony the more satis- 
fying that it is not constant concord and repeated 
sameness. 

Our drama, advancing through centuries, had 
slowly reached this stage of growth, where if its 
development had been stayed its history would 
have been utterly without interest, except to the 
literary antiquarian, when suddenly its homely, 
uncouth bud burst into flower so sweet, of beauty 
so glorious, so perennial, as ever after to gladden, 
to perfume, and to adorn the ages. The rapid- 
ity of this transition is astonishing. It is almost 
like magical transformation. In less than twenty 

* There is conventionality enough and to spare in the every- 
day life of people of English race in the United States, and still 
more in that of the same race in Great Britain. But they see, 
and, more, they feel, the unnatural restraint of pure convention- 
alism. They act under it with an awkward self-consciousness. 
They scorn it, and have some contempt for themselves for their 
conformity to it. Whereas the people of the continent of Europe 
believe in it, accept it without a question, enter into it heartily, 
and act under it unconsciously. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 4OI 

years from the time when the best plays yet pro- 
duced by EngHsh authors were intrinsically un- 
worthy of a place in literature, the English stage 
had become illustrious. This change was brought 
about by the great and increasing taste of the 
day for dramatic performances, which called into 
the service of the theatre every needy hand that 
held a ready pen. A crowd of young men left 
the learned professions in London, or, abandoning 
rustic homes, flocked thither, to make money by 
writing plays. Among these men seven attained 
distinction ; and yet not only so inferior, but of 
so little intrinsic, enduring interest was the work 
of six of them, that, with one, and hardly one, 
exception, their names would not have been 
known outside of purely literary circles but for 
the seventh. They were Thomas Kyd, John Lilly, 
George Peele, George Chapman, Robert Greene, 
Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. 
Of the six, the oldest whose age is known to us 
was only ten years the senior of the seventh ; and 
the most eminent, Marlowe, was born but two 
years before him.* Shakespeare got to work in 
London very early in life. He was using his pen 
there as a dramatic writer before he was twenty- 
four years old.f These men were therefore in 

* Lilly was born about 1553, Peele about the same year, Chap 
man in 1559, Greene about 1560, Marlowe about 1562, Shake- 
speare in 1564. The date of Kyd's birth can only be conjectured. 

t See Section XH. of the Essay on the Authorship of Kittg 

z 



402 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

both the strictest and the broadest sense his con- 
temporaries, — his contemporaries as men and as 
authors. The mere fact that he found four of 
them, Kyd, Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, in the 
front rank of dramatic writers on his arrival in 
London, does not properly entitle them to consid- 
eration as his predecessors in the English drama. 
Being so absolutely contemporaneous with him in 
age, they could be justly regarded as his prede- 
cessors only as having been the founders of a 
school of which he was an eminent disciple, or to 
which he had established a rival or a successor. 
But he stood to them in neither of these relations. 
He and they were all, with a single exception, of 
one school, of which neither one of them was the 
founder. With this one exception, these men 
were all striving to do the same thing, at the 
same time, in the same way. The time had come 
when it was to be done, and the time brought the 
men who were to do it, each according to his 
ability. And not only were their aims identical, 
but there is the best reason, short of competent 
contemporary testimony, for believing that four 
of them, including Shakespeare, were co-laborers 
upon still existing works.* 

Henry the Sixth, Vol. VII. of the author's edition of Shake- 
speare's Works. 

* See the Introduction to the Tamiitg of the Shrew, and the 
Essay upon King Henry the Sixth, in the author's edition of 
Shakespeare's "Works. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 403 

The exception to this unity of purpose was 
John Lilly, the Euphuist. Lilly is known in dra- 
matic literature as the author of eight comedies 
written to be performed at the court of Eliza- 
beth.* They are in all respects opposed to the 
genius of the English drama. They do not even 
pretend to be representations of human life and 
human character, but are pure fantasy-pieces, in 
which the personages are a heterogeneous med- 
ley of Grecian gods and goddesses and impossi- 
ble colorless creatures with sublunary names, all 
thinking with one brain and speaking with one 
tongue, — the conceitful crotchety brain and the 
dainty, well-trained tongue of clever, witty John 
Lilly. They are all in prose, but contain some 
pretty, fanciful verses called songs, which are as 
unlyric in spirit as the plays in which they appear 
are undramatic. From these plays Shakespeare 
borrowed a few thoughts, but they exercised no 
modifying influence upon his genius, nor did they 
at all conform to that of the English drama, upon 
which they are a mere grotesque excrescence. 

Chapman, one of the elder and the stronger of 
the six above named, is not known as the author, 
even in part, of any play older than Shakespeare's 

* Lilly's plays are Efidimion, Campaspe, Sapho and Phao, 
Gallathea, Mydas, Mother Bofnbie, The Woman in the Aloone, and 
Love''s Metamorphosis. The Maid''s Metamorphosis, which was 
published anonymously in 1600, has been attributed to him, as 
also has A Warning for Faire Women, which was published anon- 
ymously in 1599 ; but neither of them bears traces of his style. 



404 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

earliest performances. He probably entered upon 
dramatic composition at a somewhat later period 
in life than either of the others ; and as a drama- 
tist is properly to be passed over in this place as 
not having been Shakespeare's predecessor in the 
mere order of time by even that very brief period 
which may be admitted in the cases of Peele, 
Greene, and Marlowe. Upon the styles of these 
three dramatists I have remarked elsewhere* that 
I cannot entirely assent to the opinion enter- 
tained by many persons, that Marlowe's talents 
were very far superior to those of the two others, 
at least as far as Peele is concerned. Marlowe 
was indeed the most gifted dramatic writer of his 
time, in our language, except Shakespeare. His 
imagination sometimes shaped out living forms, 
though monstrous ; and from the murky clouds 
of his bombast there shoot fitful gleams of real 
poetic fancy. Peele's plays, it is true, lack some 
of the fire and fury of Marlowe's ; but they are 
also without much of his fustian. His charac- 
ters are less strongly marked than Marlowe's, but 
they are also less absurd and extravagant, and in 
my opinion they are equally well discriminated ; 
but that is little praise. Peele's David and Bath- 
seba is a play which, for the genuineness of its 
feeling, if not for the harmony of its verse, Mar- 
lowe might have been glad to own ; and The Bat- 
tle of Alcanzar is in the same furious, savage vein 

* Essay upon the Authorship of King Henry the Sixth. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



405 



with his Tamburlame, and equal, if not superior, 
to it in sense and keeping. It is also noteworthy 
that the prologue to VqqIqs Arraigmnent of Paris, 
which was published in 1584, when Marlowe was 
but twenty years old, and before he had taken his 
Bachelor's degree at Cambridge, is, for union of 
completeness of measure with variety of pause, 
unsurpassed by any dramatic blank verse, that 
of one play excepted, written before the time of 
Shakespeare. In forming a comparative judg- 
ment as to Marlowe, it must be borne in mind that 
there is good reason for believing that Edward 
tJie Second, his best play in versification, no less 
than in style, sentiment, and character, was writ- 
ten after 1590, and after the production of The 
First Part of the Contention, and The True Tragedy 
of Richard, Dnke of York, in which he had some 
lessons in dramatic versification from Shake- 
speare.* 

With regard to these dramatists there only re- 
mains to be noticed the claim which has been set 
up for one of them,f Marlowe, that he was the 
first who used blank verse upon our public stage, 
and " the first who harmonized it with variety of 
pause." As to which I will only say briefly, that 
although it is probably true that he in his Tam- 

* See the Essay on the Authorship of JiTm^ Henry the Sixth, 
before mentioned. 

t By Mr. Collier in his History of English Dramatic Poetry, 
&c., and Mr. Dyce in his Life of Shakespeare. 



4o6 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



biirlahie made one of the earliest efforts to bring 
blank verse into vogue in plays written for the 
general public, and to substitute the roll and flow 
of measured rhythm for the feebler and more mo- 
notonous music of rhyme in dramatic poetry in- 
tended for uncultured as well as cultured ears, I 
cannot find in this endeavor reason for giving him 
the credit due to an innovator, much less that 
which belongs to an inventor. Blank verse, as 
we have seen, was used in plays produced for 
special occasions and audiences many years be- 
fore Marlowe wrote ; and he, writing only for the 
general theatre -going public, seems merely to 
have used and somewhat improved an instrument 
which he found made to his hand. 

Among the dramatists who preceded Marlowe 
in the use of blank verse on the public stage is 
one who, in my judgment, wrote it with a spirit 
and freedom which Marlowe himself hardly ex- 
celled. This dramatist is the unknown author of 
Jeronimo. A continuation of this play, called 
The Spanish Tragedy^ or Hieronimo is mad again, 
was one of the most popular dramas of the Eliza- 
bethan era. It was written, as we know on the 
testimony of Thomas Heywood, by Thomas Kyd ; 
and hitherto it has been maintained, perhaps I 
should rather say assumed, that Kyd was also the 
author of yerojiiino. But it seems to me very 
clear that the fact that Kyd did write The Spanish 
Tragedy is conclusive against his authorship of 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



407 



the elder play. It is hardly possible that they are 
by the same writer. And as yeronimo is a typi- 
cal play of the transition period between the pre- 
Elizabethan and the Elizabethan drama, the ques- 
tion as to its authorship may be here opportunely 
examined. There is no contemporary testimony, 
direct or indirect, upon this subject. Hey wood's 
evidence is limited to the authorship of The Span- 
is Ji Tragedy.* Ben Jonson, who makes the only 
other contemporary allusion to Kyd's performance, 
refers only to the same play. In the Introduction 
to CyntJiids Revels^ where he indulges his cynical 
humor at the expense of his immediate predeces- 
sors and his contemporaries, Jonson makes one 
of the interlocutors, speaking of the critics in the 
audience, say: "Another, whom it hath pleased 
nature to furnish with more beard than brain, 
prunes his mustachio, lisps, and with some score 
of affected oaths, swears down all that sit about 
him, 'That the old HieronimOy as it was first acted^ 
was the only best and judiciously penn'd play of 
Europe.' " And in the immediately preceding 
speech, he makes this allusion : " O, (I had almost 
forgot it, too,) they say the timbrce or ghosts of 
some three or four plays departed a dozen years 
since have been seen walking about your stage 
here." Now the ghost of the lover in Jeronimo 

* Heywood says : " Therefore Mr. Kyd in the Spanish Tragedy, 
upon an occasion presenting itself, thus writes : 

*Why, Nero thought it no disparagement,' " &c. 



4o8 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



is brought in as chorus in The Spanish Tragedy ; 
and this circumstance, coupled with the proximity 
of the two speeches above cited, makes it plairi 
that Jonson had the latter play in mind, as prin- 
cipal among the three or four to which he refers. 
Cynthia s Revels having been produced in 1599, 
this gives us 1587 as the date, not at which "the 
old Hieroitimo " was first acted, as hitherto it 
has been somewhat strangely assumed, but about 
which it had become old and worn enough for a 
playwright, cynical and vain like Jonson, to place 
it among those which had " departed," although it 
was often acted during the dozen years which he 
had in mind. We know that it is The Spanish 
Tragedy to which Jonson refers as "the old Hie- 
ronimo^' not only because he uses the name 
Hieronimo, instead of Jeronimo, but because he 
refers to it " as it was first acted " ; which shows 
that in 1599 the play in question was not per- 
formed as Kyd had left it, but had been " newly 
revived and polished according to the decorum of 
these days," as Tailored ajtd Gismiinda, written in 
1568, is announced to have been, on its title-page, 
printed in 1592. It was a common practice at 
that time thus to revive and polish old plays 
which had achieved and retained public favor. 
Now of the two plays before us The Spanish 
Tragedy was the popular favorite ; and that we 
know, from Henslowe's Diary, was twice added 
to by Jonson himself between the time of his 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



409 



gibe at it and 1602. But yeronimo, although not 
published until 1605, when at least four editions 
of The Spanish Tragedy had been issued, includ- 
ing two which contained, as their title-pages 
announced, the "new additions" which Jonson 
made,* shows no trace of alteration or addition, 
and no announcement of any appears upon the 
title-page, which absence we may take as more 
than a negative pregnant.f Ben Jonson was not 
alone in his contempt of The Spanish Tragedy. 
It is jeered at by many writers of the Elizabethan 
era, including Shakespeare. The great favor with 
which it was popularly regarded seems to have 
nettled the dramatists of that day, and justly; for 
it is a very feeble and ridiculous performance, 
which probably owed its theatrical popularity to 
the murder and suicide which plentifully enliven 

* " The Spanish Tragedie, containing the lamentable ende of 
Don Horatio and Bel-imperia : with the pittiful death of old Hie- 
ronimo. — Newly corrected and amended of such grosse faultes as 
passed in the former impression. At London, Printed by Wil- 
liam White, dwelling in Cow lane, 1599." 

" The Spanish Tragedie, containing the lamentable ende of Don 
Horatio and Bel-imperia : with the pittifull death of olde Hieron- 
imo. Newly corrected, amended, and enlarged, with new addi- 
tions of the Painter's part and others, as it hath of late been di- 
vers times acted. Imprinted at London by W. W. for T. Pavier, 
and are to be solde at the signe of the Cat and Parrots near the 
Exchange. 1602." 

t " The First Part of Jeronimo. With the Warres of Portugall, 
and the Life and Death of Don Andrsea. Printed at London for 
Thomas Pavyer, and are to be solde at his shop, at the entrance 
into the Exchange. 1605." 
18 



4IO 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



its action,* and to the extravagance of its situa- 
tions. Jeroniino escaped such gibes as those which 
were levelled at The Spanish Tragedy ; and well 
it might ; for it is a very much better composition 
than its successor : in construction, though rude, 
at least not inferior, and far superior in dramatic 
and poetic power.f 

In the absence of testimony as to Kyd's author- 
ship of Jeroiiimo, internal evidence must decide 
the question, if it can be decided. For as to sub- 
ject and personages, (which are, so to speak, iden- 
tical in that play and in The Spanish Tragedy^ 
they, and not only they, but in a certain degree 

* Nine several extinctions of life by hanging, stabbing, and 
shooting, and in one case by both, take place before the audience 
in The Spanish Tragedy. They are thus recounted with gusto 
by the Ghost at the end of the play : — 

" Aye, now my hopes have end in their effects, 
When blood and sorrow finish my desires, 
Horatio murdered in his father's bower ; 
Vile Serberine by Pedringano slain ; 
False Pedringano hang'd by quaint device, 
Fair Isabella by herself misdone, 
Prince Balthazar by Belimperia stabb'd ; 
The duke of Castile and his wicked son, 
Both done to death by old Hieronimo ; 
My Belimperia fallen, as Dido fell ; 
And good Hieronimo slain by himself, 
Ay, these were spectacUs to please my soul." 

t But Mr. Collier says, " As a dramatic production Jeronhno 
is in every respect below The Spaizish Tragedy,'''' which he calls 
"a very powerful performance." — History of Dramatic Poetry ^ 
Vol. III. pp. 208, 209. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



411 



plot, and even language, were looked upon as com- 
mon property in the early part of the Elizabethan 
era, when play-writing was a trade and plays were 
patchwork. A comparison of the. play which we 
know Kyd did write with that which we do not 
know he wrote, shows that they are utterly unlike 
in construction, in characterization, and in every 
distinctive quality of style. Both are defiant of 
the unities, and even of the possibilities, of time 
and place ; but the action of the elder play, Je- 
ronimo, is direct, spirited, and manly ; that of the 
later, The Spanish Tragedy, is confused, languid, 
and childish. In characterization both are weak 
when compared with Shakespeare's, or even Mar- 
lowe's works ; but compared with each other, 
the elder is the stronger and more original, the 
later at best feebly copying the traits of the elder. 
But it is in style that their unlikeness is most 
striking. Blank verse and rhyme are mingled in 
both, Jeronimo containing a larger proportion of 
the latter. But so far is this from being an indi- 
cation that Jeronimo is the earlier and The Span- 
ish Tragedy the later work of a man who was 
ridding himself of the trammels of rhyme, and 
gaining freedom of versification by practice and 
example, that the very rhymed couplets of the 
former are freer and more varied than the blank 
verse of the latter, which is formal and monoto- 
nous, with a pause in sense and rhythm at the end 
of almost every line; while the blank verse of 



412 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



Jeronimo has often an ease and breadth and va- 
riety never attained by the author of The Span- 
ish Tragedy, or by any other dramatist before 
Shakespeare, except occasionally by Marlowe.* 
In merely interlocutory passages, where speeches 
consist of but a few words, the author of the elder 
play composes his verses of the speeches of va- 
rious characters, or disregards the completion of 
a verse, and writes merely in measured rhythm. 
Kyd, on the contrary, gives a perfect line or two 
to each speaker. f One peculiarity of the versifi- 

* " Come, valiant spirits ; you peers of Portugal 
That owe your lives, your faiths and services. 
To set you free from base captivity : 
O let our fathers' scandal ne'er be seen 
As a base blush upon our free-born cheeks : 
Let all the tribute that proud Spain receiv'd 
Of those all captive Portugales deceased, 
Turn into chafe, and choak their insolence. 
Methinks no moiety, not one little thought 
Of them whose servile acts live in their graves. 
But should raise spleens big as a cannon-bullet 
Within your bosoms : O for honor, 
Your country's reputation, your lives freedom, 
Indeed your all that may be termed revenge. 
Now let your bloods be liberal as the sea ; 
And all the wounds that you receive of Spain, 
Let theirs be equal to quit yours again. 
Speak Portugales : are you resolved as I, 
To live like captives, or as freeborn die." 

t The following brief passage from Jeronimo exhibits the au- 
thor's manner in such passages as are above referred to. 
" Jeron. What ! have I almost quited you 1 
Andrea. Have done 

Impatient marshal. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



413 



cation of Jeronimo is very striking : this is the 
frequent insertion of a hemistich in the midst of 
a speech in blank verse of several lines. Eigh- 
teen instances of this occur in that short play, 
but not one in the much longer Spanish Tragedy. 
The student of Shakespeare will remember many 
such in Macbeth, King Lear, and Hamlet. Mar- 
lowe does not use them. The supposition that 
this peculiarity in yeronimo may be due to imper- 
fection of the manuscript, or the carelessness with 

Balth. Spanish combatants, 

What ! do you set a little pigmy marshal 

To question with a prince .'' 

Andrea. No, Prince Balthezar 

I have desired him peace that we might war." 
This presents a striking contrast to the following passage from 
The Spanish Tragedy, which shows Kyd's style in like circum- 
stances. 

" Lorenzo. Sister, what means this melancholy walk ? 
Beli7nperia. That for a while I wish no company. 
Loren. But here the Prince has come to visit you. 
Bel. That argues, that he lives in liberty. 
Balthazar. No, madam, but in pleasing servitude. 
Bel. Your prison then, belike, is your conceit, 
Balth. Ay, by conceit my freedom is enthralled. 
Bel. Then with conceit enlarge yourself again. 
Balth. What if conceit have laid my heart to gage ? 
Bel. Pay that you borrowed and recover it. 
Balth. I die if I return from whence it lies. 
Bel. A heartless man, and live ? a miracle ! 
Balth. Ay, lady, love can work such miracles. 
Loren. Tush, tush, my lord, let go these ambages, 
And in plain terms acquaint her with your love. 
Bel. What boots complaint when there 's no remedy ? " 



4J4 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

which the only existing edition was printed, is 
precluded by the fact that these hemistichs gen- 
erally rhyme with the following line. Fifteen of 
the eighteen instances in question have this pecu- 
liarity, — in itself a remarkable trait of style.* 
The Spanish Tragedy is filled with classical allu- 
sions, its author having brought the Greek my- 
thology constantly into his service, yeronimo is 
absolutely free from this cheap exhibition of schol- 

* Of this rhymed hemistich, and also again of the freedom and 
harmonious variety of pause which distinguish the blank verse in 
yeronimo, the following brief passages are examples. 

" Lorejizo. Andrea 's gone embassador ; 
Lorenzo is not dreamt on in this age : 
Hard fate, 

When villains sit not in the highest state ! 
Ambition's plumes, that flourish'd in our court, 
Severe authority has dash'd with justice ; 
And policy and pride walk like to exiles 
Giving attendance, that were once attended." 

*' 'T is said we shall not answer at next birth 
Our father's faults in heaven ; why then on earth ? 
Which proves and shows that which they lost 
By base captivity, 

We may redeem by honor'd valiancy : 
We borrow naught : our kingdom is our own : 
He 's a base king that pays rent for his throne." 

" And thou long thing of Portugal, why not } 
Thou that art full as tall 
As an English gallows, upper beam and all, 
Devourer of apparel, thou huge swallower, 
My hose will scarce make thee a standing collar. 
What, have I 'quited you t " 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



415 



arship, if we except a single mention of Mars, and 
the introduction of Charon, whose names and 
functions were familiar to the general public of 
that period. But The Spanish Tragedy is not 
only distinguished by this trait ; it has Latin quo- 
tations in the midst of its speeches. An entire 
speech of one of the personages is in Latin. Ital- 
ian and Spanish are also quoted. This use of for- 
eign language occurs sixteen times in the play. 
In one instance, and that where the situation is 
most touching, the principal personage quotes 
from the ^neid fourteen lines of Dido's last dy- 
ing speech and confession. But in Jeronimo, al- 
though it is about half as long as its continuation, 
not one word of Latin, Spanish, or Italian occurs. 
This peculiarity of The Spanish Tragedy Shake- 
speare ridicules in The Tamhig of the Shrew ; 
and it is one which might be expected in Kyd, 
who was a scholar and a translator more than a 
poet. The difference in the spelling of the name 
of the principal personage common to both plays 
becomes, under these circumstances, significant. 
It has been supposed that this was due to the dis- 
covery by Kyd, in the interval between the produc- 
tion of the two plays, " that Jeronimo was rather 
Italian than Spanish." But a mistake like the 
one supposed is exactly the one into which the 
author of The Spanish Tragedy and the transla- 
tor of Garnier's Cornelia would not be likely to 
fall. Who wrote yerormno we do not know. 



4i6 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



But can there be a doubt that Kyd was not its 
author ? 

The Spanish Tragedy had been written, as we 
have seen, long enough before 1587 to be then an 
old story. We may be equally sure that the play 
of which it is a continuation had preceded it some 
years. In structure yero7iimo bears strong traces 
of the pre-Elizabethan era. It opens with a dumb 
show, explanatory of the situation of the charac- 
ters before the action commences ; * the action 
does not "grow to a point," and the play conse- 
quently reads less like a tragedy than an episode 
of history, dramatized with little constructive art. 
Quite one half of the play is in rhyme ; and among 
its dramatis personcB one is allegorical, — Revenge. 
This personage and the Ghost of Andrea, the 
slain lover, who appears with him in the last scene 
of Jeronimo, are also used by Kyd in The Span- 
ish Tragedy ; but in that they merely form a cho- 
rus, and neither mingle in nor influence the ac- 
tion. The traits of Jeronimo just mentioned, and 
particularly the first and last, are indicative of a 
period earlier than that known as the Elizabethan 

* " Sound a signet, and pass over the stage. Enter at one door 
the King of Spain, Duke of Castile, Duke Medina, Lorenzo, and 
Rogero ; at another door, Andrea, Horatio, and Jeronimo. Je- 
ronimo kneels down, and the King creates him Marshal of Spain. 
Lorenzo puts on his spurs and Andrea his sword. The King 
goes along with Jeronimo to his house ; after a long signet is 
sounded, enter all the Nobles with covered dishes to a banquet. 
Exeufit omnes. That done, enter all again as before." 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



417 



era ; while the versification and characterization 
belong to that era, and indeed would disgrace 
none of its dramatists except Shakespeare him- 
self, and are hardly unworthy of his prentice hand. 
Dumb shows went out as the Elizabethan dram- 
atists began to occupy the stage ; and allegory 
is the distinctive trait of the period of the moral- 
plays, although, as we have seen, it yielded place 
gradually to real life. The use of dumb show, 
and especially the introduction of an allegorical 
character among the dimnatis persoiice of a trage- 
dy of real life, written in blank verse, of which 
no other example is known to me, distinctly mark 
the transitional type of yeronimo ; which may 
be regarded as a fine and characteristic example 
of English tragedy in the stage of its develop- 
ment immediately preceding that which produced 
Shakespeare. And indeed this play and its con- 
tinuation, in spite of the crudeness of both and 
the childishness of the latter, seem to have left 
stronger traces of influence upon Shakespeare's 
works than any other or than all others written 
by his predecessors or his contemporaries.* 

* A critical examination and comparison of these two trage- 
dies would be an interesting and perhaps not unfruitful task ; but 
enough of these pages cannot be spared for that purpose. The 
reader who desires to examine them for himself will find both 
yeronimo and The Spanish Tragedy among Dodsley's Old Plays, 
and the latter in Hawkins's Origin of the English Drania. It is 
my intention to undertake, in an Essay supplementary to this 
volume, a critical examination of these two tragedies and their 
relations to Shakespeare's works. 

18* AA 



4i8 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



The English drama, and not the theatre and 
the stage, before the time of Shakespeare, is the 
subject of this account ; but it may be fitly closed 
with a very brief description of the play-houses 
and the theatrical management of his early years. 
The general use of inn-yards as places of dra- 
matic amusement has been already mentioned in 
the course of remark upon the moral-play ; and 
when Shakespeare arrived in London at least 
three inns there, the Bull, the Cross Keys, and the 
Bell Savage, were thus regularly occupied. But, 
by a striking coincidence, with the Elizabethan 
era of our drama came theatres proper, — buildings 
specially adapted to the needs of actors and au- 
diences. Shakespeare found three such in the 
metropolis, — four, if to The Theatre, The Curtain, 
and The Black-friars, we are to add Paris Garden, 
where bear-baiting shared the boards with comedy. 
All the theatres of Shakespeare's time were prob- 
ably built of wood and plaster. Of the three above 
mentioned, the Black-friars belonged to the class 
called private theatres, we know not why, unless 
because the private theatres were entirely roofed 
in, while in the others the pit was uncovered, and 
of course the stage and the gallery exposed to the 
external air. A flag was kept flying from a staff 
on the roof during the performance. Inside, there 
was the stage, the pit, the boxes and galleries, 
much as we have them now-a-days. In the pub- 
lic theatres the pit, separated from the stage by a 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



419 



paling, was called the yard, and was without seats. 
The price of admission to the pit, or yard, varied, 
according to the pretensions of the theatre, from 
twopence, and even a penny, to sixpence ; that 
to the boxes or rooms, from a shilling to two shil- 
lings, and even, on extraordinary occasions, half a 
crown. 

The performance usually commenced at three 
o'clock in the afternoon ; but the theatre appears 
to have been always artificially lighted, in the 
body of the house by cressets, and upon the stage 
by large, rude chandeliers. The small band of 
musicians sat, not in an orchestra in front of the 
stage, but, it would seem, in a balcony projecting 
from the proscenium. People went early to the 
theatre, for the purpose of securing good places, 
and while waiting for the play to begin, they read, 
gamed, smoked, drank, and cracked nuts and jokes 
together ; those who set up for wits, gallants, or 
critics liked to appear upon the stage itself, which 
they were allowed to do all through the perform- 
ance, lying upon the rushes with which the stage 
was strewn, or sitting upon stools, for which they 
paid an extra price. Pickpockets, when detected 
at the theatre, seem to have been put in an extem- 
pore pillory on the stage, among the wits and gal- 
lants, at whose tongues, if not whose hands, they 
doubtless suffered. Kempe, the actor, in his Nine 
Dales Wonder, A. D. 1600, compares a man to 
" such a one as we tye to a poast on our stage for 



A20 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

all the people to wonder at when they are taken 
pilfering." 

Certain very peculiar dramatic companies of 
Shakespeare's time should not be passed by here 
entirely without notice. They were composed en- 
tirely of children. The boys of St. Paul's choir, 
those of Westminster school, and a special com- 
pany called the Children of the Revels, were the 
most important. The first two companies acted 
under the direction of the Master of St. Paul's 
choir, and of the school, the last under that of the 
Master of the Revels. Their performances were 
much admired, and the companies of the adult 
actors at the theatre were piqued, and perhaps 
touched in pocket, by the public favor of these 
younkers. Shakespeare shows this by the com- 
plaint which he puts into Rosencrans's mouth, in 
Hamlet. Their audiences were generally composed 
of the higher classes, and they acted plays of es- 
tablished reputation only. This appears from the 
following passage in yack Drums Entertainment, 
published in 1601, which was itself played by the 
children of Paul's, as appears by its title-page. 

" Sir Edward. I sawe the children of Pawles last night, 
And troth they pleas'd me prettie prettie well. 
The Apes in time will do it handsomely. 

" Planet. I faith I like the audience that frequenteth there, 
With much applause : A man shall not be choakte 
"With the stench of Garlicke, nor be pasted 
To the barmy lackett of a Beer-brewer. 

*' Brabant jii. Tis a good gentle audience, and I hope the Boys 
Will come one day into the Court of Requests. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 42 1 

" Brabant Sig. I, and they had good playes, but they produce 

Such mustie fopperies of antiquitie 

As do not sute the humorous ages backs 

With cloathes in fashion." 

Sig. H. 3. b. 

The performance was announced by three flour- 
ishes of trumpets. At the third sounding, the 
curtain, which was divided in the middle from top 
to bottom, and ran upon rods, was drawn, and, 
after the prologue, the actors entered. The pro- 
logue was spoken by a person who wore a long 
black cloak and a wreath of bays upon his head. 
The reason of which costume was, that prologues 
were first spoken by the authors of plays them- 
selves, who wore the poetical costume of the Mid- 
dle Ages, such as we see it in the old portraits of 
Ariosto, Tasso, and others. When the authors 
themselves no longer appeared as Prologue, the 
actors, who were their proxies, assumed their pro- 
fessional habit. Poor Robert Greene, the de- 
bauched playwright and poet, begged upon his 
miserable death-bed that his coffin might be 
strewed with bays ; and the cobbler's wife at 
whose house he died respected this clinging of 
the wretched author to his right to Parnassian 
honors, and fulfilled his request. 

In the early part of the Elizabethan era, it was 
common for all the actors who were to take part 
in the play to appear in character and pass over 
the stage before the performance began. This 
was a relic of the days of the miracle-plays and 
moral-plays. 



422 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

In the course of the piece, he who played the 
clown would favor the audience with outbreaks 
of extemporaneous wit and practical joking, in 
virtue of a time-honored privilege claimed by the 
clowns to "speak more than was set down for 
them." Indeed, extempore dialogue seems to have 
been permitted to, if not expected from, the rep- 
resentatives of comic characters. Such directions 
as the following, in Greene's Tu Quoque, A. D. 
1614, are not uncommon : — 

^^Here they two talke a7id rayle what they listj then 
Rash s^eakes to Staynes. 

'''■All Speake. Ud's fool dost thou stand by and do 
nothing? Come talke and drown her clamors. 

" Here they all talke and Joyce gives over weeping and 
Exit:' 

Between the acts there was dancing and sing- 
ing ; and after the play, a jig ; which was a kind 
of comic solo, sung, said, acted, and danced by the 
clown, to the accompaniment of his own pipe 
and tabor. Each day's exhibition was closed by 
a prayer for the Queen, offered by all the actors 
kneeling. 

The stage exhibited no movable scenery. It 
was hung with painted cloths and arras ; and 
when tragedy was played, the hangings were, 
sometimes at least, sable. Over the stage was a 
blue canopy, called " the heavens." But although 
there was no proper scenery, there was ample 
provision of rude properties, such as towers, 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



423 



tombs, dragons, pasteboard banquets, and the like. 
Furniture was used of course, and was in many- 
cases the only means of indicating a change of 
scene ; which indeed, in most cases, was left to the 
imagination of the audience, helped, it might be, 
as Sir Philip Sidney says, if the supposed scene 
were Thebes, by " seeing Thebes written in great 
letters on an old door." * Machinery and trap- 
doors were freely used, and gods and goddesses 
were let down from and hoisted up to the heav- 
ens, in chairs moved by pulleys and tackle that 
creaked and groaned in the most sublunary and 
mechanical manner. At the back of the stage 
was a balcony, which, like the furniture in the 
Duke Aranza's cottage, served " a hundred uses." 

* Such stage directions as the following show how very rude 
were the devices for indicating a change of scene in the latter 
part of the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth cen- 
turies : — 

" Enter Sybilla, lying in childbed, with her child lying by her.'''' — 
Heywood's Golden Age, 161 1. 

^^ JSnter a Shoemaker sitting on the stage at work, yenkin to 
him.'''' — Greene's George-a- Greene, 1599. 

In the following passage the audience were evidently expected 
to " make believe " that a few steps across the stage were a going 
to the town's end : — 

" Shoemaker. Come, sir, will you go to the town's end now, sir ? 

" yenkin. Ay, sir, come. — Now we are at the town's end ; 
say you row ? " — Idem, tit sicpra. 

In the plays of that period, after a murder or killing in combat, 
the direction is generally to the survivor, " Exit with the body." 
There was no device by which the dead body could be shut out 
from the audience, that the next scene might go on without its 
presence. 



^24 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 

It was inner room, upper room, window, balcony, 
battlements, hillside. Mount Olympus, — any place, 
in fact, that was supposed to be separated from 
and above the scene of the main action. It was 
in this balcony, for instance, that Sly and his at- 
tendants sat while they witnessed the perform- 
ance of The Taming of the Shrew. 

The wardrobes of the principal theatres were 
rich, varied, and costly. It was customary to buy 
for stage use slightly worn court dresses and the 
gorgeous robes used at coronations. Near the 
end of the last century, Steevens tells us, there 
was "yet in the wardrobe of Covent Garden 
Theatre a rich suit of clothes that once belonged 
to James I." Steevens saw it worn by the per- 
former of Justice Greely in Massinger's New Way 
to pay Old Debts, The Allen Papers and Hens- 
lowe's Diary* inform us fully upon this point. 
In the latter there is a memorandum of the pay- 
ment of £Ae I4i". (equal to $\2(S) for a single 
pair of hose; and by the former we see that £i6 
(equal to ^400) was paid for one embroidered vel- 
vet cloak, and £20\os. (equal to ^512) for an- 
other. Costume of conventional significance was 
also worn ; for Henslowe records the purchase, at 
the large price of ^3 ioj., of "a robe for to goo 
invisibell." 

A comparison of the prices paid for dresses 
with those paid for the plays in which they were 

* Both printed by the Shakespeare Society. 



THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 



425 



worn shows us that the absence of scenery and 
of stage decoration, to which it has been supposed 
we owe much of the rich imagery in the EHza- 
bethan drama, was due only to poverty of re- 
source, and not to the higher value set by the 
public, and consequently by the theatrical propri- 
etors, upon the intellectual part of their entertain- 
ment. The highest sum which Henslowe records 
as having been paid by him before 1600 as the 
full price of a play is £8, not half what was given 
for a cloak that might have been worn in it ; the 
lowest sum is £4, not as much as the hero's hose 
might have cost. By 161 3 theatrical competition 
had raised the price of a play by a dramatist of 
repute to ;^20, which, being equal to ^500 of the 
present day, was perhaps quite as much as the 
proprietors could afford, and was not an inadequate 
payment for such plays as went to make up the 
bulk of the dramatic productions of the day. 
Happily, nearly all of these have perished, and of 
those which have survived, the best claim the at- 
tention of posterity only because Shakespeare 
lived when they were written. 



THE END. 



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